


play a poor hand well

by CordeliaRose



Series: Corey/Morey [6]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Corey discovers what the hell he actually is, M/M, Self-Discovery, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28506924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CordeliaRose/pseuds/CordeliaRose
Summary: It’s not really a surprise for Corey when an identity crisis rears its ugly head one day, considering that half of him is a total mystery and the other half is a chameleon, of all creatures.
Relationships: Corey Bryant/Mason Hewitt
Series: Corey/Morey [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/849141
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	play a poor hand well

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the Jack London quote, “life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well”.  
> corey had sooooooooooo much potential on the show – as a character and in terms of his abilities & as i’m sure my lovely readers know by now, i am forever bitter about how little Corey was featured or developed. this is yet another of my attempts to rectify that. hope you enjoy!

It's been three days since they exorcised the giant murderous pug from Mason's body, and Corey took Mason back to the Hewitts' and curled around his shaking body and did his best to assuage him of his misplaced guilt. Two days since Mason nervously brought up the fact that they'd never defined what they were, if they were boyfriends or you know, whatever, which led to ten minutes of posing hypothetical scenarios to each other before Corey got tired of talking in riddles and dropped to his knees to show Mason just how much he did really want to be his boyfriend. One day since Mason returned the favour, hesitant and determined and "I really want to do this, this isn't an unhealthy coping mechanism, I just want to suck your dick" when Corey stopped his trembling fingers opening his jeans.

All in all, it’s been a remarkably productive three days: Corey helped to save his sort-of-boyfriend from the spirit of a seventeenth century dickhead, upgraded that label from sort-of-boyfriend to actual-boyfriend (which still makes him want to do cartwheels even though he definitely cannot do cartwheels and he definitely would break his neck), and blowjobs. The perfect life.

Mason crashed a few hours ago, seventy-two hours of energy drinks and coffee and power naps snatched sporadically whenever their eyes flickered shut without their permission. Corey is still awake, simultaneously exhausted down to his bones and thrumming with unspent energy. At least part of it is a supernatural thing, but there’s also something to be said for being a teenage boy with a new boyfriend. Especially one who’s as hot as Mason, because damn. Just being in his presence has kept Corey burning hot like fire embers, and even the cool breeze of a California night isn’t doing much to subdue that.

Which is why he is now wandering the streets of Beacon Hills in the early hours of the morning, adrenaline howling ferociously under his skin and physically itching as it tries to escape. He tried running through the preserve, but his goal of mindless sprinting led to him stumbling across the tree that he used to climb with Josh and Tracy when they needed a break from the insanity that was their new lives. He had to bite his lip until his teeth broke the skin and then it healed and he broke it again and again to stop a feral scream from disturbing the town. Attacking the tree until the bones in his hands and feet finally crunched under the pressure did little to relieve it; the pain faded along with the healing, no longer the burning reminder it used to be when he dragged razor blades across the delicate skin of his wrists or thighs or hips.

Even as his bones heal, his heart fractures under the crushing realization that nobody went to find their bodies. They’re rotting in the sewers, organs liquifying and skin peeling. Forgotten by everyone, including him. He knows what he has to do.

When he’s finished burying his friends, not coated in sweat so much as drowning in it, he staggers once more to the opening of the sewers. The front door to his last home. Closure is the goal, even if he’s not entirely sure how to do that. People are always talking about it like it’s the Holy Grail, but nobody ever bothers to explain how to achieve it. After standing there in the entrance for a few awkward, useless minutes, Corey forces leaden legs to carry him forwards.

He stumbles through the area they’d designated as a bedroom and nearly suffocates in his own grief at the sight of sleeping bags and duffel bags. Hurries through the so-called training area, which was just a bare room Theo would attack them in until they were somewhat able to defend themselves.

In his desperation to evacuate – closure is some kind of bullshit conspiracy theory, clearly, made to sell grief counselling and self-help books – he makes a wrong turn, and tumbles into the lab instead of finding the ladder to freedom. The vials and flasks scattered around tables bring a rolling nausea to his stomach, and the operating table – a bench with leather straps for restraint – with its blood-stained instruments sitting innocently by it threaten to punch it out of him.

A clumsy step backwards knocks a table and results in an avalanche of manilla files to the grungy concrete. Corey instinctively drops into a crouch to gather them up, but then he freezes. Instead of replacing them on the table he clutches them to his chest like a lifejacket. Nothing within him can explain why he wants to steal them away, but he does. Maybe this is closure.

Their duffel bags in the ‘bedroom’ are still stuffed with supplies; clothes they’d each packed when they left home, bulk packs of protein bars and dried fruits, anaemic pillows and ragged blankets. Corey empties them thoughtlessly. He certainly doesn’t want anything tainted from his time down here, and the other two aren’t going to be getting any use from them. Not anymore.

He winds up stuffing four bags with the files, shoving them in unceremoniously without concern for bent corners or crumpled pages. Zips yanked at harshly to get them closed and contained. He even checks in the cupboards and drawers of the lab for anymore in one final sweep before he leaves, then flees the scene of the crime with his burgled treasures.

Corey retreats to his own house with the bags slung over his shoulders, ignoring the aching fatigue weighing down his bones, and dumps the bags in a corner of his bedroom. Sitting there, thrown dramatically into shadow by the bare bulb dangling from his ceiling, he’s suddenly keen to put distance between himself and what he’s just done, and races back to Mason’s, also loathe to be away from his boyfriend for any longer. The protective instinct that had emerged once he’d realised Mason was being possessed has yet to fade, or perhaps this is just what it is to care about someone. He hasn’t really had that for a while. He likes it.

Mason’s room is, conveniently, right above the one-storey extension that the Hewitts had built a few years ago. The extension – a new dining room with an obscenely large mahogany table and no fewer than twenty chairs, and an honest-to-god chandelier, only used when their extended family came to visit on holidays – has a gently sloping roof which peaks just under the large window of Mason’s room, and whatever fancy architect the Hewitts had hired and paid obscene amounts of money to had designed a pattern of protruding bricks on the side of the wall that served nicely as a ladder. It’s basically been created with sneaking in and out in mind. That fancy architect deserves the obscene amounts of money.

Mason doesn’t stir when he ever so gracefully definitely doesn’t fall through the window into the room, still sprawled on top of his stupidly large bed like a lopsided octopus. Not that Corey’s complaining; it’s as comfortable as it is oversized, and it means that they can get a good few rolls in when they make out without danger of toppling off. 

He slips into the attached bathroom and runs the shower, adjusting the fancy temperature controls – it’s a digital screen, it’s ridiculous – until the water is almost scalding from all three shower heads, which again is ridiculous but not something that Corey denies himself the pleasure of.

He uses Mason’s body wash, and then his shampoo and conditioner, and then stands underneath the combined sprays even after he’s washing away the sweat and grime. It helps to imagine the water cleaning him of the phantom dirt the night’s activities have left him with, carrying the miasma down the drain as it goes. When he steps out and scrubs at himself with a towel he smells like Mason. He might not be part-wolf, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t please a small primal part of him.

Wearing just a borrowed pair of sweatpants and leaving his hair still damp enough to leech water onto the pillow, Corey slips onto the bed and twines himself with his boyfriend. Mason mumbles something unintelligible, barely roused but registering his presence, and shifts better into his grip. A goofy grin spreads unbidden over Corey’s face and he buries his face into the back of Mason’s neck to hide it automatically. 

* * *

The rest of the spring break blurs into Mason and work – dates, early morning shifts, more dates, late nights waiting tables at the family-run restaurant just outside of town, meeting Mason’s parents and feeling more accepted than he does by his own, hours spent with the animals at the shelter grooming and feeding and walks, MasonMasonMason-

The next semester falls around far too soon, and the blur slows to a crawl when schoolwork and lacrosse join the fray. Mason is no less intoxicating.  
  
Then there’s the Ghost Riders, and the first two weeks of summer break in the hospital slowly recovering. Mason calls his employers before he even wakes up with a fairly plausible excuse about a hit-and-run, and wrangles three weeks off for him. He spends the extra week after Melissa agrees he can be discharged but no strenuous activity being fussed over by Mason. Then he works almost double the amount of shifts he’d normally take over summer vacation for a couple of weeks, just so he can have yet another week off to accompany the Hewitts to Venice. Mr and Mrs – please just call us Benjamin and Vanessa – stoutly refuse to let Corey pay for absolutely any of the trip, and Mason just smiles in a helpless what can you do? kind of way and kissing him whenever he tries to protest. The two of them are even trusted with their own hotel room, and on the second night Corey discovers that the four-star hotel’s room service isn’t limited to pillow mints and a well-stocked minibar – which they have been forbidden from using, but they’re trusted with a glass of wine at dinner. The bathroom cabinet has a variety of condoms and small bottles of lube in various flavours, and on the fourth night they “go all the way” as Mason endearingly phrases it. They leave the curtains open to show the gently lit canal stretching over the horizon, and Spotify’s Calming Classical in the background. 

It’s about as perfect as their first time could be, especially considering that less than a year ago Corey was dead and Mason got turned into a glowing werewolf on steroids whenever somebody tuned their radio wrong.  
  
Venice doesn’t last forever, but the new depth to their relationship swells steady in the background. It grows and strengthens over the remainder of the summer as they pass most of their free time wrapped up in each other, and the start of junior year carries on in much the same way. The truth about the supernatural world is revealed (with much stammering on Mason’s part, and several demonstrations of invisibility on Corey’s) to Benjamin and Vanessa the same night that Monroe flees town. They react how Corey has predicted they would all along – primarily concerned for Mason’s safety, and otherwise thrilled by the new world and all its knowledge waiting to be unravelled at their fingers. They also wrap Corey up in an embrace so tight he can’t catch his breath for a few seconds, and promise him that this changes nothing, he’s always welcome at their house, they love him.

Monroe’s cult has mostly deserted her by the following summer, when the end of the school year rolls around, and her capture and defeat is anticlimactic. It’s still a physical weight off the shoulders of the entire pack, and everyone is cautiously optimistic that Beacon Hills with return to relative normalcy – hunted or assorted supernatural threats every other week, that is to say. With the older members back for their own breaks, the feeling of safety triples, and the soon-to-be-seniors join their peers in partying the summer away in a haze of dubstep and alcohol.

Corey totters back from one of these parties – a bonfire that had amazingly ended in no casualties – in the early hours of the morning, drunk off the heady sensation of making out with Mason for several hours and the juniper-spiked vodka he’d downed. The dried, powdered juniper berries had been gifted to him by Dr Deaton, who informed him with a playful glint in his eye that it should work much along the same principles of wolfsbane to werewolves, juniper berries apparently being toxic to chameleons. It had indeed worked very well, and Corey is more than a little drunk. He’d escorted Mason home safely and had, with extreme difficulty and impressive self-control, declined the innuendo-laden offer to come inside. Mason’s parents had been good-naturedly teasing about the last time they’d come back from a party and had very nearly undressed each other in the foyer, but Corey doesn’t want to push his luck nor his welcome.  
  
His own parents aren’t even in the state, so Corey is free to create as much of a racket as he likes when he lurches into his house. He passes ten minutes composing his own version of Queen’s We Will Rock You using metal pans and wooden spoons, and then another ten struggling to remember how to cook a grilled cheese. He slumps to the floor to eat, knees tucked up to his chest and the sandwich balanced on them as he nibbles. He’s missed being drunk. This grilled cheese is some gourmet shit.

Then he strips down to his boxers, purely because he can, and struts around the house singing nonsensically to himself for a while. Mason sends him a text littered with as many typos as legible words, but the string of emojis tucked onto the end suggests that he’s attempting to simultaneously tell Corey how much he loves him and sext. Corey tries to reply in kind, but it takes him a whole minute to type ‘ur so hot’ so he surrenders and discards the device onto the rug of the living room where he absolutely won’t be able to find it tomorrow. Sounds like a problem for Sober Corey, that asshole.

He’s not particularly tired, but now that he can’t sext Mason and he’s tasted heaven there’s not any point in staying awake. The stairs prove to be quite the task, possibly on par with scaling Mount Everest amidst an avalanche, but crawling on all fours proves to be effective if not dignified. He continues the gait for the short distance into his bedroom, because if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and scuttles towards his bed with plans to clamber onto it and sleep until at least midday. The vodka instead comes up with the hilarious plan to make his limbs slip from under him and he topples sideways, his fall broken by a convenient pile of soft duffle bags.

Corey is going to thank them, but then he remembers what they house and narrows his eyes in a glare instead. He’s never completely forgotten about their presence, but he’s also never allowed himself to think about them in anything more than the most abstract of senses, like over in the corner is the worst part of my life. With Smirnoff chugging through his system and chipping away at his self-control, the top bag is suddenly open and spewing files like it’s been eviscerated.

He tugs one free carefully. The top right corner has been bent backwards but otherwise it’s undamaged, blank smooth card betraying no secrets. Prying the file open takes far more effort than it should, considering how light it is, but there isn’t anything to be scared of anyway. The page inside is written in some kind of secret, alien language; strange spikes and curves forming characters, strung together indiscernibly. 

Oh, wait. It’s Greek.  
Corey squints at the letters. He only knows the very basics, thanks to the state-sanctioned torture that is calculus, so he can make out a ‘D’, and an ‘L’. And those are ‘A’ and ‘B’, but four letters out of however many the Greek alphabet has doesn’t exactly bode well. Not to mention that it’s, you know, a whole different language on top of that.

Of course those Dread Doctor bastards encoded their files. Why wouldn’t they? Why don’t we make Corey’s life easy for once, oh no, let’s write in a completely foreign language because he’ll love that. Now he can’t read the files even if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t.  
  
Shit, he does want to read them.

His laptop hums aggressively as it starts up, crotchety in its old age (three and a half years is the new eighty) and reluctantly lets him log in after several millennia have passed. Corey heads straight to Google, types in a thread of gibberish that the search engine manages to correct as ‘greek keyboard online’ for him, and then another load of gibberish that inexplicably results in Google Translate popping up.

Painstakingly, Corey uses the keyboard to copy out the first line of the page. It’s fairly unremarkable, just black characters on a white A4 sheet, too neat to be handwritten. Corey remembers there being a typewriter in the lab, conspicuous because it was three times the size you’d expect, keys larger and spaced apart to account for the Doctors’ clanky gloved hands. But whatever it says is undoubtedly nefarious and relating to some kind of vivisection or human experimentation, and the knot in his stomach grows taut with each click of a character onto the screen. When he’s finally finished the line, he copies and pastes it into the Google Translate box.  
  
It just spits the exact same sequence of letters back at him, still in the Greek alphabet. Corey blinks at it, checks he pasted into the right box, checks he’s set up the correct languages, and then blinks at it again. “Why aren’t you working?” he asks it, poking at the side of his laptop like it’s deliberately spiting him. He wouldn’t put it past the machine.

Then it hits him. The Dread Doctors were pretentious motherfuckers; this is probably ancient Greek, like how old-timey poets would write their stuff out in Latin because they wanted to show off how educated they were. Another quick Google search confirms his theory – Duolingo has a whole article about accents in Greek, and tells him that modern Greek uses only the acute, whereas ancient used the acute, grace, and circumflex. When he scans down the document, he can indeed see all three.

Well. He could trawl the internet for an unreliable ancient Greek translator, or he could just teach himself the language and translate all of these files himself. Corey glances over his shoulder at the bags, lumpy and straining with their contents. What’s the saying – a stitch in time saves nine? It would be much better for him to translate accurately in the first place than risk some online programme mangling the contents and then him having to do it anyway, right? And if he gets to learn another language along with the five he’s already studying, well. That’s just a bonus, because he’s kind of obsessed with languages and linguistics. In a cool, non-nerdy way. He bench-presses cars while reciting irregular verbs.

“Here we go then,” he mumbles to himself, closing his laptop lid and staggering to bed. He’ll, uh, start tomorrow.

* * *

His plot to sleep until midday is scuppered by the three Great Danes across the street, who start to protest their lack of breakfast rather cacophonously just before ten. Corey knows that’s the reason for the commotion, because it happens every morning without fail. Their owners both work shifts from noon to midnight, and use the eco-friendly options of dogs over traditional alarm clocks. He usually doesn’t mind, because he’s either at school or already awake – though his parents have some choice words about the situation on the rare occasions they’re home – but right now he’s had about five hours sleep and his healing is still wonky from the juniper berries he’d ingested. It feels like his brain is being used as a trampoline by a small, demented gnome.

“Please,” he groans, to himself or the dogs or to God. “Pleeeeease.”

The barking stops five minutes later. Corey’s will to live shrivelled up a little while before that, but he’s not going to get back to sleep now that his stupid lizard-brain (haha, just some werechameleon humour) has seen the sun and knows it’s daytime. 

Groggy, and angry at the general concept of life, Corey showers quickly and curses the entire world when there aren’t any clean towels because he hasn’t done laundry yet. He wraps his duvet around his shoulders to head downstairs, partly to preserve his modesty but mostly as a guard against the chill of being a dumbass who forgot to turn the heating on when he came home last night. Sufficiently goblin-esque, he hobbles downstairs and pokes at the thermostat until it submits to his divine will. His clothes from last night are strewn around the living room and he reluctantly sheds the duvet to crawl into them, then reclaims the warm shell and putters off to make himself some breakfast.

The only breakfast-appropriate food he can find is cereal, but he doesn’t have any milk to go with it. It’s clearly a sign from a higher power, so he gives up and scoffs a vat of chocolate pudding instead. Time doesn’t exist, et cetera. Halfway through the tub his phone shrills from its shallow grave, mostly consumed by the shag rug that very badly needs a steam clean, or a one-way ticket to the bin.

It transpires that he did send the ‘ur so hot’ text last night after all. Mason replied ‘U ARE’, then ‘tired ily goodnight’ within the same minute, so Corey doesn’t feel too guilty about dropping off the face of the earth. He does trot back upstairs and plug it into the charger when he’s finished his balanced and nutritious breakfast though, because its earlier screaming seemed to have been about low battery. Maybe Mason will want to sext later, can’t be missing that. He sends a quick reply just so Mason is aware he’s still alive, of seven hearts in the gay pride colours and the emoji of two boys holding hands.

Urgent affairs dealt with – his stomach, the love of his life, and the avoidance of public indecency – he locates his wallet, checks his season bus ticket is still inside, and then grabs a jacket and shoes to wander down to the bus stop. He catches it so often that he knows the timetable off by heart; it comes every hour on the hour, but also at strange random intervals between those hours. The next one will be at 10:43, unless Dolores is driving. Then it will be 10:53, because she’s chronically ten minutes late.

He could just borrow Mason’s car – he’s on the insurance policy, Vanessa did that as soon as she discovered that Corey doesn’t have his own car – but his boyfriend doesn’t have the questionable luxury of canine alarm clocks, and is likely still dead to the world and unaware of the impending headache he’ll be nursing for the rest of the day. His parents might be awake, but he doesn’t want to bother them on a rare day off work even if they are. And it just feels weird swanning off with someone else’s car without asking their permission first, even if he’s been told a thousand times that he doesn’t need to.

Besides, he’s quite excited about the prospect of spending some time on his own. He’s barely had a moment to himself so far this summer, various pack members surrounding him every which way he turns, and while he loves them all dearly he has also found himself frighteningly close to the edge of a precipice called ‘taking a lead pipe to their heads’. Sometimes…they just talk. And don’t stop talking. Only Mason is allowed to do that.

The bus trundles up on time, which means it’s Myrtle in the driver’s seat. She exclaims delightedly when she sees Corey, asks him how school is going, makes sympathetic noises when he tells her about AP classes next year, and then pulls out her phone to show him a picture of her newest adopted alpaca. This brings the count up to seven. Corey has never been so envious in his entire life.

The trip to Ontario takes just over half an hour and drops him a couple of blocks from his destination. It’s peak tourist season, which means that most Californian natives have gone abroad and the streets are packed with confused vacationers. A deadly combination that leads to nobody knowing common etiquette of how to exist in public spaces. But Corey’s adept at crowds, even if he doesn’t like them. People barely notice him as they examine fold-out maps or pose for cameras – why they want photos on a random street is beyond him, but there are worse crimes in the world. Genocide, for example, often ranks as pretty bad.

The shop is blissfully empty when he steps inside. Not too many patrons of a bookstore on a summer Saturday morning, it would seem. There’s a family with two young daughters perusing the children’s section, obviously twins from the identical manes of curly, brown hair and wide, toothless smiles, wearing matching dresses and tights but in opposite colours. In the bestsellers’ corner there’s an elderly couple comparing hardbacks, but nobody else aside from the clerk at the tills.

He recognises the clerk – Sandy, so-called after Grease, and mostly the reason she now dyes her naturally blonde hair green, she’d confessed to him one Monday evening when they’d been the only two there, because fuck having to change yourself just to get some greaseball – and they trade smiles as he ambles past the check-out towards the educational section. She has a paper chain snaked around her and trailing onto the floor like Rapunzel’s plait spilling from her tower, and knowing Sandy it’s equally likely to be a personal project as one for the store.

He easily spends over half of his time in the shop over in this alcove, so deeply set that it’s more like an extra room. Fiction is great, but he has to dedicate at least a month to a standard novel. Most of his spare not-Mason time is consumed with studying, and he is incredibly grateful for the wide range of guides they stock here. And the wide range of non-judgemental looks the cashiers wear when he appears with several different brands of Physics revision guides.

The back shelf is stocked with language and travel guides, most of them modern. Corey’s eyes skim hungrily over Essential French Verbs, Hamburg: A Tourist’s Guide, A Spanish-English Dictionary, Italian for Beginners, Beijing for Travellers, Japanese in Thirty Days, before he lands on the bottom two shelves dedicated to the classics. He nearly runs his fingers over the spine of A Complete Latin Grammar longingly, but the family are opposite him and he doesn’t want them to think he’s some kind of book pervert. “I’ll come back for you,” he tells it under his breath, which in retrospect isn’t any better, and restrains himself to the language he actually came for.

Sandy eyes him dubiously when he sets the stack down in front of her. “Another one?” she deadpans, well aware of his addiction to languages. She’s enabled it in the past, too, sneaking him a copy of Beginner’s Italian that had come in with a bent cover and couldn’t be sold. “The Complete Book of Ancient Greek Grammar,” she reads out. “Branching out to stuff that nobody speaks, huh?”

“It’s for a school project,” Corey says, because he can’t get into the truth and he knows Sandy will threaten to host an intervention if he says it’s just for fun. “Extra credit.”

Sandy shakes her head in despair, but still swipes her staff discount card and gets him ten percent off. He does the same for her when she comes into the restaurant late at night for a take-away burger. They like to refer to each other as friends with benefits, which is hilarious to them because they’re both gay, but nobody else seems to find it funny. Their loss.

“Enjoy your nerd-fest,” she says by way of farewell, shoving a funky pen and bookmark into the bag as well as his actual purchases, just like Corey sneaks a serving of onion rings into the paper bag at the restaurant. 

“Enjoy your double shift,” he says back. Sandy mimes stabbing herself in the eye with her coupon scissors, then drops them abruptly and plasters on a bright grin when the two girls come racing up to her with their own books. They’re both enchanted by her hair within seconds, but she still shoots him an amiable grin as she bends over the counter to let the twins examine her hair, which she assures them is entirely natural, she just thought really hard about swamps and then it was green the next morning.

Corey admires his new books on the bus ride back, this one with a driver he doesn’t recognise and doesn’t have any alpacas to show him. He got all three volumes of Ancient Greek from Scratch, a dictionary and the grammar reference book Sandy had judged him over. They smell perfectly like paper and ink, and the covers are glossy and sleek, fluorescent overhead lights on the bus bouncing off in irregular waves. He’s conscious that his reverence of new books borders on creepy – Mason watched him once with an expression of vague concern and told him later it was like a strange, softcore porn that even he couldn’t get behind – but he’s happy, so. The true sign of success is having haters.

He quite literally collides with the alarm clock dogs on the walk back to his house, and can’t bring himself to be even slightly annoyed with them because they’re such good boys and nearly fall over themselves trying to say hello to him. They all get chin scratches and assurances that they’re beautiful, and Corey makes brief awkward chat with the guy walking them about the state of the economy that leaves him wanting to saw his tongue off. But the dogs are cute.

By the time he’s lugged himself and his purchases back up to his room, his phone is almost fully charged and chirping with seven new texts from Mason. Three of them are extolling the capabilities of modern medicine, from which Corey discerns that he’s dosed himself with aspirin and his hangover has all but disappeared, one apologising profusely for his quote-unquote pathetic attempts at sexting last night, a picture of an interesting slug he found in the garden, a string of heart emojis, and a link to a free Finnish course being taught online because he thinks Corey’s linguaphilia is adorable and something to be encourage and nurtured, much like a budding plant.

Corey allows himself three minutes to collapse on his bed with his phone clutched to his chest, internally squealing, before he pulls himself together. Dead languages don’t learn themselves, even if your boyfriend is the cutest person that has ever existed in the entire history of the whole universe.

Mason texts him again. He used a California wildlife website to identify the exact species of slug he found and is now informing him about Limax maximus, common name leopard slug.

Corey has never been so in love.

* * *

The dead language learning gets relegated to the back burner not even an hour later, when Mason calls to invite him over. “Hi,” he says breathlessly when he opens the front door, and immediately circles his hands around Corey’s wrists to tug him inside. “So, uh, my grandma fell down the stairs this morning.”

“Is she okay?” Corey asks automatically but kind of pointlessly, because if she wasn’t Mason would probably be calling him from the hospital in tears, not leading him through the house to the garden. The pool is uncovered and a pitcher of lemonade is waiting on the patio table with two glasses.

“Pretty much.” Mason pours them both a glass from the jug and then re-covers it with a tea towel, a harsh lesson they’d learned after the great ant incident of last summer. “She's broken her arm, so she needs a bit of help. My cousin is going to stay with her for a few weeks, just do some cleaning and cooking, you know.”

Corey nods, sipping the lemonade. Mason isn’t wearing a shirt, and Corey is thirsty for more than the drink. Plus Mason is doing that mouth-moving-but-no-sound thing he does when he has something to say but can’t figure out how to phrase it. He waits and wonders if he should take his top off too, or if Mason’s abs are somehow related to what he's about to spit out and then Corey would just look like an exhibitionist weirdo.

“She can't get there until next week,” Mason blurts. It takes Corey few minutes to realise he's referring to his cousin, distracted as he is by the sunlight reflecting off Mason's glorious bare chest. His boyfriend is truly a deity in mortal form.

“So…?” He has been trying to subtly condition Mason into speaking his mind more with gentle prodding prompts, but on this occasion it’s mostly just because he’s a dumbass and isn’t sure what this has to do with anything. Aside from Mason’s life in general, which he’s a fan of.

“So I volunteered to go stay with her this weekend,” Mason rushes, and then winces. “Are you mad?”

Corey looks at him blanky for a few moments. “Am I mad that you’re selflessly giving up your time to take care of your elderly relative? Yes, I’ve never been angrier.” He tries to say it with a straight face, but much like Corey himself, straight isn’t an option – he breaks into a helpless grin as he finishes talking, which Mason immediately mimics in relief.

“No, I mean – we were going to...you know.” Mason’s expression turns significant. Oh. Oh, yes, Corey does know. Mason’s parents are in New York for just under a week, and Mason had ordered them some...things to try out with the empty house. “But I’m going tomorrow, so...”

“I don’t have a shift tonight,” Corey offers quickly, and then his brain catches up to his mouth and thankfully verifies that statement. Not that it matters particularly, he’d ring into the restaurant with claims of the bubonic plague if he was scheduled. “We’d probably have to get started now, though.”

“I have no complaints. Like, none whatsoever,” Mason agrees just as hastily, stepping forward to cradle Corey’s face between his palms as they kiss. “Pool?”

“Pool sounds good.”

“Great. Um. Do you – I can get -” Mason runs a thumb just above Corey’s jeans, sweeping over the pale skin there. Corey temporarily loses all brain function, and who can blame him. “I didn’t mean to presume that you, ah, wouldn’t, you know-”

Corey drags himself away from the intoxicating touch for just a second so he can try to understand his boyfriend’s ramblings. If he wasn’t already so tipsy off Mason, he might have laughed. “Are you asking if I want you to get us swimming trunks?” Only Mason.

“Well, yeah,” Mason says, flustered in his defence as he realises that clothing is a strange thing to offer after inviting someone into your bed – or pool, as the situation may be.

“Mason,” Corey says fondly, and tugs his shirt over his head. Then he undoes his jeans and shimmies those off. “Mason,” he repeats, but lower this time, in the voice that makes Mason inhale sharply and bite his lip. His boyfriend’s eyes track his movements as he steps out of the crumpled jeans and then thumbs at the top of his boxers.

Mason snaps out of his trance. “Oh, oh, I think I’d better do that,” he says hurriedly, adorably earnest, crowding into Corey’s space and kissing him urgently, hands hot where they skim over his sides, his stomach, anchoring in the elastic of the waistband and tweaking them away.

* * *

Mason drops him back at his house the next morning with plans to drive straight to his grandmother’s in Fresno, a four-hour drive if the traffic isn’t too bad. The last family visit in April last year had revealed that there was only one spot on the sprawling converted farmhouse that sometimes got any phone reception, and Mason promises to sit on that guest room balcony as often as he can. “We’re not joined at the hip, you know,” Corey grouses at that, “I can survive three days apart.”

“I can’t,” Mason replies plaintively, and leans over the centre console to kiss him. “Please talk to someone while I’m gone, yeah?” Mason has a thing about ‘healthy amount of social interaction’, or whatever, something about studies linking it to being physically and mentally well. Corey’s protests that years of being a loner have given him immunity were met with unimpressed eyebrows, and now he’s being guilt-tripped into talking to people every day. Ugh.

“I’ll keep an eye on the group chat,” Corey promises, lacklustre to even his own ears. Mason looks pained. “I’ll be fine, Mason. I’m not a kid, and even when I was, I could take care of myself.” His upbringing wasn’t particularly fun, but he’s the only member of the pack who’s allowed in the kitchen unsupervised following last year’s Thanksgiving, so that’s something.

“I know,” Mason says immediately. “I just-” He grabs Corey’s hand and wraps it in both of his own, bringing it to his lips so they brush feather-light against the sensitive skin over his knuckles as he talks. “I just think that you’re too good at taking care of yourself,” he says softly, “and that you don’t realise when you don’t have to.” Corey shifts in the passenger seat, twisting so he’s sideways and facing Mason directly. Silent permission to continue. “You have a pack. So many people who love you. You don’t have to be alone.”

Corey knows Mason would sit and talk about this for hours if Corey wanted to. Needed to. He has done before. About Corey’s fear of being anything other than belligerently independent; how he finds it hard to accept that people can like him not because he’s offering them anything but purely by his own merits. That most people aren’t seeking to exploit him for their own gain. 

“I think that sometimes,” Corey says delicately, careful that his words don’t seem like a mockery of Mason’s own, “you forget that I’m an introvert.” And obsessively terrified of rejection and making a fool out of himself, but whatever.

Mason huffs out a laugh; it’s warm over his hand. So is his smile. “I do,” he acquiesces, “and I’m sorry if I treat you like a kid sometimes.”

Corey ducks his head. “I know you just care about me,” he mumbles. It would be hard not to know at this point, with almost all of their (rare) arguments centred around a perceived lack of regard for their own safety, on both ends, and Mason regularly bringing up the topic of therapy completely unprompted.

(“What about Lucy? You know, the Caladrius that Theo sees?” Mason tries over breakfast one day. “He says she’s really great.”

Corey hums. “I haven’t killed anyone,” he muses as he hunts in the fridge, “so I don’t know.” When he turns around with the orange juice, Mason is making a face like he can’t decide if he should laugh or cry.

“Murder isn’t a requirement for therapy,” he says in a slightly strangled tone. “You can go to therapy for reasons other than murder. And anyway, you were murdered.”

“Yeah, but I’m over it,” Corey says airily, waving a piece of bacon carelessly to show just how unbothered he is.)

Mason leans his cheek against their linked hands. “I care about you a lot. More than a lot. With all of my being.”

Corey’s entire world starts to melt at the corners. It’s impossible to adequately express the role that Mason plays in his life, to describe just how important he is, the depth of his love. “Aw, you sap.”

Mason pulls his hand free in faux offence. “Get out,” he orders, grinning despite his affronted tone. “You’re the worst boyfriend in the world.”

Cackling, Corey tumbles from the car and jogs around the hood to the drivers’ side, taps on the window until Mason rolls it down with a long-suffering sigh. “Hey. Ditto.”

“So romantic,” Mason grumbles, the last syllable sheared a beat too early when Corey leans in to kiss him. 

Corey leaves his forehead resting against Mason’s when he breaks the embrace. “I love you,” he says in the voice that only Mason gets to hear, soft and vulnerable and frayed under its own weight.

“I love you too.” A shared breath. “I’ll miss you.”

“Me too.” Another kiss, and then Corey reluctantly steps back. “You should go if you want to beat the traffic.”

“I should.” Mason snaps his seatbelt back on. “See you soon.” While looking right into Corey’s eyes, we know life is uncertain more than most but I’m not leaving you to fight your battles alone.

“Three days,” Corey says, looking right back with the same intensity. You’re not getting rid of me that easily. He waits there until Mason has turned at the end of the road and is out of sight, idly wondering if he needs to get groceries or if he should just live off pasta for the next few days. That sounds good.

He spends the rest of the day giving the kitchen a much-needed deep clean, realising how gross it is after seeing the Hewitt’s immaculate fridge and spotless marble-top counters – even if they had desecrated one of those counters while making dinner last night. Mason cleaned it with bleach, nobody will ever know.

In between scrubbing at mysterious stains on the interiors of cabinets, stacking dusty bowls in the dishwasher, and emptying the contents of the fridge’s vegetable drawer – which he contemplates against for a moment, in case Mason wants to examine the new life-forms that have been cultivated on whatever vegetables are now primordial soup – he chants the Greek alphabet to himself. The book – Ancient Greek from Scratch, Volume One: The Basics - is on the small table in the corner of the room, pinned open to the first page by a small jar of cumin so Corey doesn’t have to touch it with miscellaneous gunk and mould spattered over his gloves.

He moves onto drawing the characters in the air when he’s got it memorised, reciting the list with ease and tracing lines in front of him. By the time the kitchen is fit for humans to spend any significant length of time in, he’s confident that he’s got it all down. Phi gave him trouble for a while, but it’s his bitch now.

The next two Masonless days are dedicated to definite articles and noun endings. Corey resorts to Post-Its, scribbling singular nominative masculine on one side and the answer on the other. Rinse and repeat twenty-three times for each of the cases and declensions, because why not have two dozen ways to say ‘the’? Just make everything a little bit more complicated, everyone loves that.

Then they get stuck on random objects around the house, a revision method he’s always used. Want a glass of water? Better remember what the plural neuter dative definite article is first, bub. Turning on the TV? The remote wants to know the singular feminine accusative noun ending, and make it snappy. 

By the time Mason returns from his grandmother’s, weary but happy in that wholesome, bone-warming way when you’ve been doing something good, Corey’s gotten pretty good. The entire house is clean, too, and according to Febreze smells like Bora Bora Waters. To Corey’s more attuned nose, it smells more like a bunch of chemicals, which is still better than alcohol-soaked sofa cushions and cigarette smoke clinging to curtains. Mason seems to enjoy it when he swings by, at any rate.

He doesn’t falter when he hangs up his jacket and finds a sticky note dangling precariously above the coat hooks, just calls, “Plural feminine genitive definite article?” through to the living room, where Corey is randomly hitting at the ceiling with a feather duster, and then, “I’m gonna go with yes because I can’t read this,” when Corey shouts the answer back.

“Greek?” He slots himself behind Corey and nuzzles into his neck, inhaling deeply like he’s been starved of oxygen. “I missed you.” 

Corey drops the duster, not sure there are even any cobwebs around. Spiders and insects in general don’t seem to come near him anymore – he still isn’t sure if that’s a supernatural thing, or specifically a chameleon thing. Calm down bugs, he doesn’t have a prehensile tongue. Yet.

“I missed you too.” He breathes in Mason’s scent, earthy and grounding, only remembering the question a few minutes of quiet company later. “Oh, yeah. Greek. Ancient.”

“Oh wow, you’re such a nerd,” Mason mumbles into the back of his neck, pressing his lips against the top of his spine the next second like he’s apologising.

“You do quantum mechanics in your spare time,” Corey points out, but he’s already melting where Mason is making contact with him, which is pretty much everywhere. His hands are linked together around Corey’s stomach, his legs pillars upon which Corey has relaxed his own.

“Yeah, but that’s not as bad. You know the saying. ‘It’s all Greek to me’.” Mason’s still dropping small close-mouth kisses wherever he can find bare skin, which is horribly distracting and definitely an illegal move in debate competitions.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It means Greek is more complicated than quantum mechanics, which makes it nerdier. So you’re nerdier, I’m officially not the nerdy one.”

Corey snorts. “Okay, four-point-nine.” He wriggles a little so he can spin around and tuck himself under Mason’s chin, ignoring the slightly awkward bend to his knees that’s needed to maintain the position seeing as they’re roughly the same height. “Is your grandma good?”

He feels Mason’s smile against the top of his head. “Yeah, she’s good. Asked how you were. Wanted to know if you were coming for the New Year’s thing she’s hosting.” A dinner party but not that formal, according to Mason’s parents. They’d asked him way back in May and he kept forgetting to let them know.

“Oh. Yeah, I can. I checked with work, I’ve got a couple of days off either side.” Tina from the restaurant had been grouchy at having to work so many holiday shifts at first, but Corey offered to take her Christmas Eve and Boxing Day hours and they’d settled it.

“Awesome. And speaking of events...” Corey draws back, horror dawning upon him at the prospect of a social function. Mason clings onto him tighter so he can’t scuttle out of the room and play dead. It’s happened before. “How do you feel about a quadruple date?”

“That sounds horrible,” Corey says honestly. “When is it?” He knows Mason too well to assume that he has a choice in this matter. His boyfriend has definitely already agreed for both of them with adorable enthusiasm.

“An hour,” Mason says quietly, grimacing at Corey’s dissenting squeal. “I know, I know, I’m sorry, but – it's with Scott, Malia, Lydia, Stiles, Liam, Theo... it’s basically just a pack night but we’ll be at the cinema instead of someone’s house!”

“I hate pack nights,” Corey says glumly, which is a lie he has no hope of defending. He’s loved pack nights ever since the others have realized he’s happiest being left alone under a pile of blankets with Mason by his side. Or absolutely decimating everyone else at board games. Both of those at the same time is great, and it means he can retreat into his fabric armour when Malia inevitably gets frustrated and starts throwing game pieces at him. Or Uno cards, which she proved to be surprisingly lethal at and was subsequently banned from ever handling again.

Mason tries a different tactic, intimately acquainted with Corey’s weaknesses. “How about you sneak us out as soon as the film starts, and then back in just as it’s ending?” he suggests. Damn, he’s got him there. If they’re visible for the very start and end of the movie, the pack will politely pretend that they’re not aware the two of them snuck off to the projection room. Barring one minor mishap when an errant leg – they still aren’t sure whose – knocked a switch and flipped the screen upside-down, and then they’d had to become invisible contortionists while one of the cinema workers shuffled in to fix the issue, the rooms are pretty good hook-up spots.

“I also want chocolate,” Corey says, because he knows he has the power in this situation. Mason nods gravely. “And if they say ‘let’s go out for something to eat’ afterwards, we have to make an excuse. We need to feed your neighbour’s gerbil, or something.”

“Deal,” Mason says. “Make out in the projection room, chocolate, and we won’t end up in a diner with them for hours afterwards.”

They end up in a diner with them for hours afterwards. Corey doesn’t mind it really.

* * *

It takes him a while, but one week before senior year is scheduled to start kicking his ass, Corey finds himself at the end of the last volume of Ancient Greek from Scratch.

It’s a late shift at the restaurant, and a remarkably busy one. Wednesdays aren’t often so hectic, but whenever the holidays start to wind down there’s always one last desperate surge of young families and bored teenagers. The six hours were packed with serving nearly a hundred tables and take-away orders, but at least that has the happy side effect of decent tips. Enough that he can get Mason and his parents something groovy for Christmas without having to worry about feeding himself. (The Hewitts, gleaning whatever they could about his living situation, were constantly asking him to join them for dinner anyway. He only bothers getting cupboard foods unless he knows for certain that he’ll be eating by himself.)

He takes his twenty-minute break a couple of hours before he clocks off, and consumes the practice exercises on dependent substantive clauses. A group of pensioners glare distrustfully at him on the bus back home, apparently mistaking his jubilant demeanour as a sign of hooliganry. Maybe they suspect him of public urination or growing oleander flowers over in Norco (which is outlawed there, or so Mason’s text from an hour ago claims), but they’re easy to ignore in favour of replying to tell Mason how much he loves him and his strange, random facts.

The bus drops by his stop just after midnight, and it’s nearing one AM by the time he’s marched home, showered, and snacked - on raw cookie dough, because Corey may be highly independent and have been in charge of his own household since he was thirteen, but he is still a teenager. Typically he’d be making a beeline for his bed, but tonight he grabs his dictionary and grammar book, and throws himself into his desk chair with an alarming crack that could be the seat or his joints.

The world around him is quiet with sleep and he’s running a high off finishing the workbooks, confident in his ability to understand the language and the prospect of finally doing this.

It’s disheartening, to say the least, when fifteen minutes has passed and he still hasn’t been able to translate a single word.

Maybe it’s because it’s the early hours of the morning and he’s just been running around for almost eight hours. Or maybe he’s not as good as he thought he was. Maybe - 

Hold the fuck up, that’s not an ending. Corey squints and looks at the first sentence again. None of these words have the right endings – he learnt them all off by heart, and he checks in the grammar book to make doubly sure. He hadn’t been paying attention to them, hoping to just use context, but now that’s reading the words again…

“None of these words are pronounceable,” he announces to the room, running his finger underneath the printed characters like it will magically fix them. “That’s - D-N-PH-TH-E-O-E. That’s just not a word.”

Were the Dread Doctors illiterate? Were they just creating all of these useless files to add to their mystique? Or - oh shit, it’s in code.

Of course. Of course it fucking is. Of course Corey not only had to learn a whole language just so he can try to discover the truth about the deranged experimentation he’d been kidnapped and forced through, he now has to learn how to decipher the codes of three literal evil scientists. Why would anything in life be easy?

Blearily, he sends an enraged rant to Mason – three scrolls long and generally bemoaning life and why it hates him – which he’ll regret in the morning when Mason tries to make him talk about his feelings, but it makes him feel better for now. Distinctly not homicidal, at least.

With more grousing, he locates the VPN app that Mason made him download ages ago and starts it up. He’s never opened it before, despite Mason’s appalled ramblings about dark web hackers and targeted ads, but it’s fairly easy to navigate and within a minute his IP address has a one-way ticket to Athens, Greece. He’s since discovered that his laptop came installed with a Greek keyboard for whatever reason, but he’s not going to even glance at that gift horse’s mouth and just opens it.

Greek Google presents him with a couple of simple de-coders online. He assiduously taps out the first sentence of the file into a Word document, copies and pastes it into both tabs, and sets them to work. He then realises that centuries-old psychopathic geniuses probably have codes more complex than some nerdy kid on the internet can hack, and waits thirty seconds to have his theory confirmed. Both websites pop-up with what Corey assumes are error messages, and Google Translate concurs.

  
“Fuck everything,” he says aloud, and slams the laptop shut. He goes to sleep face-down, hoping that some deity or higher force will have mercy upon him and suffocate him in his sleep.

Predictably, his pleas are ignored, and equally predictably, he wakes up to a fretful text from Mason containing an unfortunate amount of emotional intelligence and insight. He deflects the questions well enough that Mason stops interrogating him for the time being, and coaxes his laptop back into working with similar success. It whirs at him grumpily until he pets the side of it, where the USB drive is shedding its inner contents one chip at a time, and then the whirs start to sound more like purrs. He’s either anthropomorphizing or this is the start of electronic sentience and the inevitable uprising.

His laptop stops bitching and starts working, but not without taunting him for last night’s failures – it chooses to be functional for the first time in its life, and restores his tabs for him. They do spark a sudden burst of inspiration, though, and he grabs his phone as he remembers that there may be one nerdy kid who’s a match for this code. Hi Lydia! Do you know anything that can decipher codes in Ancient Greek?

Lydia, genius that she is, doesn’t even ask. The little ‘R’ pops up next to his message the minute after he sends it, and she replies two minutes later with – Check your email, I’ve sent you a link. He doesn’t question how she knows his email address, because Lydia knows everything and anything that she could ever possibly need or want to, so he just obeys and logs into Gmail.

There’s no subject line, and the body is just a link to a Google Drive. Lydia’s Google Drive, and it automatically begins to download whatever she’d attached there – DeCi4.exe. His phone buzzes again with another text. Let me know when it’s finished downloading, I’ll help you set it up.

Her banshee powers have grown and she’s able to predict when someone is downloading software. Or maybe Google alerted her to someone downloading something from her Drive. Either way, her omniscience is both terrifying and comforting. No wonder Mason speaks of her in revered, hushed tones like she’s a Goddess. She is.

All done, he replies, the prospect of face-to-screen-to-face contact filling him with fear but the prospect of disobeying Lydia frankly petrifying. A video call takes over his phone a few minutes later, a selfie Lydia had added to her contact profile filling the screen.

Lydia, looking glamorous despite her pyjamas and lack of make-up, hair pulled back in a bun and secured with a sweatband, appears. She’s slightly blurry, her voice just a touch out of sync, which Corey assumes is down to his out-of-date phone and shitty Wi-Fi, and nothing on Lydia’s end. “Hi sweetheart,” she greets. Her non-sarcastic use of endearments for Corey is far above her average rate, probably because it’s clear to anybody with eyes that he appreciates them far above everyone else and also lets her drag him out to the mall and play dress-up whenever she needs to relax. “You ready to go?”

She walks him through the process of setting up and adjusting the preferences with remarkable patience, waiting whenever he needs to slowly read through a list of options to find whichever one she’s talking about and telling him that he doesn’t need to apologise for it whenever he tries to do so.

“This is one of the best decryption softwares out there,” Lydia comments when they’ve finally got it up and running. “It’s used for law enforcement and stuff. I only have it because of MIT, they want us to look at ways to improve it. I think they’re hoping to crack the Zodiac Killer’s letters with it.”

“I won’t share it with anyone,” Corey promises. “Thank you so much, Lydia.”

Lydia, who’s moved from her room to the kitchen to breakfast on a yoghurt parfait, beams at him. “I hope it works. Let me know if you need anything else!” She ends the call with a cheery wave of her spoon. Corey understands why Mason follows her around like a puppy; he’s a little bit in love with her too. He texts his boyfriend to update him on this latest development, then places his phone screen-down so he doesn’t get distracted. Mason might text him with pictures of wildlife in his garden, or the pack’s group chat could explode with histrionics over somebody eating the last of somebody else’s Doritos, and he knows himself well enough to anticipate full distraction over the drama if that did happen.

Actually, some mindless drama would be quite nice, because he soon discovers that the entire process takes a ludicrous and mind-numbing amount of time. Corey spends the better part of fifteen minutes typing in the characters of the first five sentences of the file, agonisingly slow in his unfamiliarity with the keyboard layout, and then the software predicts a further fifteen to decode. He stabs the next few lines into a blank document, ready to go as soon as the first batch finishes, and only has one existential crisis in the meantime. The decryption takes twenty-two minutes to complete, and Corey immediately opens the file it spits out.

The NotePad application loads up, and proudly presents a load of boxes with question marks in them. Corey stares at it for a few seconds in befuddlement. These definitely aren’t letters of the Greek alphabet, unless there’s a mass Hellenic conspiracy to conceal their true language from the rest of the world. 

A quick Google informs him that NotePad doesn’t support Greek letters, but some helpful person on a forum has created an add-on that does. The link to download it has since expired – the comment is from six years prior – but venturing onto page three of Google search results reveals a Redditor who has re-uploaded that same add-on themselves. Ten minutes later, when his WiFi graciously permits the file to be downloaded, his laptop promptly shuts down when he tries to install it. Corey nearly jumps out of the window.

Resuscitated, and emphatically whirring its fans at him, the computer deigns to install the programme. Corey tries again. This time, the file launches with the correct alphabet, and Corey copies and pastes them into a Word document before anything else can go wrong. But then, because the universe hates him, a pop-up pops up to ask if he knows he’s currently writing in Greek (Corey is very open about the fact that he’s not the brightest spark, but he’s not sure how anybody would miss that), and when he tries to hit ‘Yes’ he accidentally selects ‘No, please take me back to English’, because his touchpad has been slightly dodgy ever since he dropped yoghurt on it during a midnight Wikipedia binge, so then everything just turns into a nonsensical string of English letters that don’t even correlate to their Greek counterparts. And then, because Bill Gates fucking hates him and his quest for the truth, Word stubbornly refuses to change the language to Greek, even when he opens a fresh window and delves into the black hole of advanced settings. He has to restart the laptop once again and repeat the whole process, and this time he manages to click ‘Yes’. And behold.

Now all he has to do is translate it.

The window looks oh so tempting.

* * *

After fighting with his printer for a couple of minutes, Corey ends up with custody of ten double-sided, double-spaced pages of Ancient Greek mumbo-jumbo. He needs more space than his desk will allow, so he ends up crouched on the floor, pages in front of him with the dictionary to his right and the grammar reference book to his left. He scrawls translations into the gaps, underlining a few words here and there that he can’t find in the dictionary.

He’s on page four when he remembers that he has a shift at the animal shelter soon, in – fifteen minutes, shit. He changes clothes, brushes his teeth, and then sprints the three miles there. He’s only ten minutes late thanks to chimera speed and stamina, but he thinks he can taste blood. His boss eyes him with raised eyebrows and calls him Sweaty Betty, then sends him to clean out the kennels and marks him as on time anyway.

The half-hour between clocking off from the shelter and clocking on at the restaurant is easily eaten by the bus journey and then a hobo shower in the restaurant’s employee bathroom. Four hours wrangling animals, cute though they may be, and then six hours serving tipsy patrons leaves him dead on his feet. And that’s not a phrase he uses lightly anymore, taking into account his rather painful and prolonged death not too long along. 

The streetlights flicker pitifully above him as he trudges home. He sympathises; he, too, is overworked and underpaid, and frequently phases in and out of existence. He has a small grudge against the one on the street corner, the bulb of which helpfully withered away just as he was approaching for several seconds and almost results in a sensual embrace with a hedge, but he makes it home intact eventually.

Corey almost bellyflops onto the couch like a paraplegic sea lion, but his stomach is making the rumbles that only an entire packet of mini marshmallows can satisfy. Luckily, there’s one such packet in the kitchen cupboard. He unhinges his jaw like a snake and tilts his head back for maximum capacity, chewing rapidly as he pours empty calories straight down his gullet. They give him enough of a sugar rush to crawl upstairs and into his room, even if they don’t give him any nutrition.

Slithering to his bed in the style of a low-budget horror movie monster, he catches sight of his unfinished translation and with a low, “Ah, fuck,” slithers over to them instead. There’s undoubtedly an argument to be made for struggling into bed and forging ahead tomorrow when his eyes aren’t twitching relentlessly, but frankly Corey doesn’t want to entertain it. It won’t prevail over his stupid obsessive mind goblin that’s started to chant gleefully about doing the translating now.

He is, however, deficient in any actual brain capacity right now, and translation is a near-impossible task. When he tries to figure out the case of the ending to the first new word, all that pops into his mind is the list of today’s specials. He circles back to the words he’d struggled with earlier, the ones he’d underlined when he couldn’t find anything in the dictionary for them. At a loss of anything better to do, he just transposes the letters directly. The resulting words look vaguely pronounceable, and after a quick Google (quick by his laptop and WiFi’s standards, that is, which equates to several agonising seconds) they turn out to be needlessly complicated medical terms. Just say “a stroke in which high blood pressure causes a blood vessel deep in the brain to rupture”, there’s no reason for this “hypertensive intracerebral haemorrhage” bullshit.

He manages the rest of the unknown words, but is forced to concede defeat when he catches up to his earlier work. By then all of his muscles have atrophied, and his bed is so tragically far away and can’t be that much more comfortable than the floor, honestly, so he pillows his head onto his arms and drifts off there.

* * *

Ow. Against his sleep-deprived hypothesis, it would appear that the bed is much more comfortable than the floor. Enhanced healing doesn’t give a fuck when it comes to hard surfaces. He feels ever so slightly like he’s been slammed into by a train, and his neck refuses to twist more than three degrees in either direction.

Ignoring his debilitating pain, Corey stumbles to the kitchen and fashions himself a balanced, nutritious brunch of onion rings and curly fries from the freezer. He watches a YouTube video of a ‘simple yoga routine’, closes it when the instructor makes him feel like crap (he just wants to stretch out his back, Susan does not need to criticise his terrible posture and associated lack of self-respect), and just resorts to leaning against the wall in varying strange positions to work out the kinks.

After he’s eaten, he retreats back into the world of genitive sandwiches and medical jargon. He doesn’t even care what half of these words mean anymore – he can look up intrinsic sphincter deficiency and nonketotic hyperglycaemic hyperosmolar syndrome later, or maybe never. 

The file doesn’t teach him anything new; all it says, reading between the lines, is that the Dread Doctors were sick bastards with no regard for the lives they destroyed with their quest for the perfect host. A fact which Corey was already intimately acquainted with, and wasn’t especially wishing for a reminder of. He shoves the decoded and translated papers in with the original and then chucks the folder under his desk, which by royal decree will henceforth be known as The Graveyard.

Corey is a functioning nearly-adult, so when he checks the time and realises that it’s just past noon, he plans the rest of his day accordingly. He showers, all but perishes from sheer tedium as he types another file into the decoding software, and then leaves for a shift at the restaurant while hoping his laptop doesn’t blow up from the exertion. Poor thing, it usually sees minimal schoolwork and whatever free porn he can find when Mason is too focused on academic achievement to jerk off together over the phone. Nerd.

Nine hours, two bus rides and over a hundred dollars in tips later – thank you very much, tipsy middle-aged ladies on their first girls’ night since Lisa’s divorce who thought he was just darling - Corey is reassured to find the house still intact. Sort of. Every so often a tile plummets from the roof and nearly brains a postal worker, but that’s been an issue for the past six months or so.

Another brawl with the printer – it has one function in life but stubbornly refuses to complete it most of the time, and Corey is not such a hypocrite that he can be angry at that ethos – and a snack of carrot sticks later, he has the second file ready. It’s shorter than the last, only three pages even double-spaced. The implications of that don’t really bear thinking about, so he just focuses on the syntax and grammar, refusing to let his brain truly process any of the words even as his hand scribbles ‘immediate failure’ and ‘species were not compatible’.

It’s also not about him, unless he’s actually part harpy and part centaur. (The file doesn’t specify which part of the centaur, which generates some intriguing mental imagery.) Suddenly, at six in the morning, it dawns on him that there’s no guarantee that his file is even mixed in with those he pilfered, and if it is then the balance of probability is stacked against him discovering it anytime soon. Grumbling, he shoves the folder into The Graveyard and gets into bed. But angrily. He punches a pillow half-heartedly and kicks at his bedding when it doesn’t miraculously drape over him like he wants it too. Because he’s angry.

The next morning, Corey emerges from his bed in the same manner that a feral cat might leave its den, hissing at the sudden light from uncovered windows and swiping at the duvet in disgust. The idea of an eight-hour shift at the shelter does not fill him with joy. Usually he’s like, “Cuddles with the animals! Helping to heal their trauma! Giving them the best life like they deserve!” but today he’s like, “I’ll probably get scratched by the cats! The hamsters will nibble me! The dogs only love me for the food and enrichment I provide them!”

And then a six-hour shift at the restaurant, the whole entire world can just get fucked.

* * *

Astonishingly, he’s still breathing. It’s the early hours of Sunday morning, and senior year starts tomorrow. Rather than serving wonderful people like Lisa and her ‘gal pals’, a phrase they used to refer to themselves so often and so without irony that Corey has to assume they saw it floating around on social media and didn’t realise its euphemistic use in the lesbian community, he was forced to deal with a couple getting engaged. 

They’re probably lovely. They were straight, but he won’t hold that against them. Much. He resents that he had to stand there in the background holding their desserts like some kind of Elizabethan fool waiting to entertain the court while the guy got down on one knee and the girl cried and everyone applauded. The dessert plates were pretty hot. Also, it made him think of Mason, and how he hadn’t texted him in three days and what a terrible boyfriend he is.

Which is why Corey is now flopping around on his floor trying to find his phone charger and softly screeching to himself when everywhere turns up empty. It’s not under his bed, not under his wardrobe, not in The Graveyard – where the fuck is it, it’s not like Corey’s room is that much bigger than a shoebox and filled with mysterious nooks and crannies. He eventually finds it already plugged in next to his bed, questions his IQ for not checking there in the first place, and jams the charger into the port roughly.

He hops into the shower while he waits for it to load up. One of the tiles in the bathroom falls off the wall and shatters while he’s under the spray, and there’s a fleeting moment of pure unadulterated terror when he thinks he’s about to be Psycho’d before he realises it’s just the shitty house again. He should probably fix it before his parents come back for their annual visit, or they’ll accuse him of pulling it off for fun. He’s not sure what they did for shits and giggles at his age that would lead them to believe he goes up onto the roof and emancipates the shingles (which was their first response when they saw dive off) and pulls tiles off the walls, but they did discipline him as a child by shoving into a pantry, so. Maybe they’re just a bit warped as human beings.

His phone’s on twelve percent when he checks it, after he’s carefully picked up all the ceramic shards and disposed of them, and the lockscreen is displaying his most recent messages. It also informs him that he has seventy-two texts from Mason. All of the previews on the lockscreen are asking him to confirm that he’s alive, not kidnapped, and just generally not in some kind of peril. There’s also one from the group chat that Stiles set up for the pack, Liam saying why are you so interested in my masturbation habits, which is a can of worms Corey doesn’t fancy opening now. Or ever, really.

He’s more concerned with letting Mason know that he’s not in mortal danger, and also begging his forgiveness for disappearing without so much as a ‘I’m going to fall off the face of the Earth now, see you in a few days’. He swipes onto the text thread and then hits the call icon next to Mason’s name. The time pops up on the screen along with the call menu, but before Corey can hang up because he forgot it was so late (early? Time has no meaning) Mason answers.

He was very clearly asleep, as most people would be, his voice still heavy but joyful when he says, “Corey! You’re alive!”

“No!” Corey blurts, because his brain registers that Mason is happy to hear from him and he disagrees deeply with that sentiment. “I mean, yes! But I’m not okay.” He backtracks again when Mason mewls a small noise of alarm. “I’m not hurt. I’m just the worst boyfriend ever!” His voice cracks involuntarily on the last word, and Corey instructs himself firmly that he isn’t going to cry. If he starts, Mason will start, and then there’ll just be an hour of woeful snivelling at each other.

“No, no, no,” Mason immediately says on the other end, steely tone clear even through the fuzzy connection. “Don’t you dare Corey, we’ve talked about this. You’re not a bad boyfriend for things that are out of your control.”

“But these things are in my control! I should have-” picked up the phone to let you know I’m alive because we live in a fucking supernatural hotspot, not let myself be so consumed that I forgot anyone else existed, remembered that I have someone who cares about me now, not spent the past three days as a translation gremlin just because I’m having an identity crisis.

“I know you always work more at the end of the holidays.” Mason’s voice is soothing, rational, low and calm. Corey feels like he might cry for all this understanding that he doesn’t deserve. “I was worried about you being safe, but I’m not mad or anything. I understand that work takes up a lot of your time.”

Corey doesn’t want to explain what he was actually preoccupied with. He can pretend to himself that this isn’t fire he’s toying with, and that he’s not going to get burned, but Mason will be instantly on edge if he knows that Corey’s willingly dredging up past trauma and bordering on obsessive about it. “I miss you,” he says instead. “I actually want school to start so I can see you every day.”

Mason laughs. There’s a rustle of covers as he rolls over, or sits up maybe. “Do you want to come over tomorrow? Or, today, I guess?”

“Yeah. I’d like that.” Maybe then he can weep in front of Mason rather than just via a phone call, because his emotions think it’s clever to betray him and make him seem like an unhinged moron.

“Awesome. Okay, promise me something?”

“Mmm?” He swipes away a tear that he absolutely did not give permission to form, let alone escape. 

“Get more than three hours sleep tonight.” Corey squawks in protest but Mason cuts him off. “I know your tired voice. How much sleep have you gotten over the past week?”

“Many.”

“I think that proves my point. Okay. Okay, you’re going to sleep for at least six hours, preferably eight, and then you’ll come over and we’ll watch a movie and make out. Yeah?”

“Yeah. That sounds really good.” It’s probably the lack of sleep, but Corey feels so totally overwhelmed by love in that moment that he might just implode.

“Well, obviously. I’m like, the king of romance.” Joke it might be, but Mason stays on the other end of the phone until he falls asleep, and sends a text for him to wake up to in the morning telling him how much he loves him.

* * *

Senior year is as gruelling as predicted, and then some. Corey is only taking three AP classes – French, Spanish, and Latin – but Mason is somehow breezing through six of his own, completing his own homework first and then helping Corey out with the obligatory sciences he’s been stuck with.

He manages to carve out a fairly regular schedule for himself despite the chaos. Lacrosse practice is every weekday afternoon from three to five, and on Thursdays they study in the library as a group. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays he’s at the animal shelter from six to eleven, and Fridays and Saturdays are restaurant shifts from six to midnight.

Theo has joined them to repeat his senior year; he skipped second grade so he’s only a year behind the majority of his peers now, and he easily explains it away to anyone curious enough that he had some health issues and had to take some time out. He had originally planned to go back while the rest of them were in their junior year, but after Liam finally filled his parents in on the whole werewolf thing, it was a short road to discovering that most of Theo’s life had been one big rollercoaster ride of abuse and Mrs Geyer had promptly browbeaten Theo into a year of intensive psychiatry. He’d complained at first, but he still goes every week now and while he’s still snarky, aloof, and just generally a dick, he’s also completely different. Happy.

Mason hasn’t retired his efforts to convince Corey to go too, but between school, lacrosse, work and his new secret hobby, he barely has time to hang out with Mason, let alone a psychiatrist. He reserves Sundays for Mason-time, which leaves him with the few meagre hours he can scrape together outside of everything else to translate the files. The Graveyard is growing substantially; his skills and vocabulary increase with each file, and the time and effort spent on each one reduces, but there’s still a good three-quarters of the folders crammed into duffel bags, waiting to be understood. And he has yet to stumble upon his own.

Saturday mornings, when he doesn’t have lacrosse matches, are for catching up on sleep, and he snacks here and there whenever he remembers to. He always has lunch at school, though, so he might be losing a bit of weight but it’s nothing drastic. And it will all be worth it if he can figure out what he actually is; call him crazy, but he’d quite like to know what creatures are having a party in his DNA.

Corey is, at long last, slapped back into reality on the fifth Thursday of the semester. More like sucker-punched right in the gut, actually. He twists his ankle awkwardly in pursuit of a stray lacrosse ball and Coach sends him off early, muttering something about how the supernatural healing defence doesn’t count for crap in reckless endangerment suits. Mason and Theo, dutiful boyfriends that they are, are sitting in the stands for moral support while annotating a digital copy of a bestiary with their own knowledge, so Corey’s first to the table in the library for the study session.

The doors swing open half an hour into his solitude, Mason’s voice halfway through a sentence. His voice is hushed in respect for the sanctity of a library’s silence, but not enough that supernatural healing can’t easily listen in. He always forgets. “-just don’t understand why it’s so bad this year. I mean, I know he has a lot on his plate, but something just feels…different.”

Liam, a fellow sufferer of supernaturally-heightened-senses-amnesia, answers at a normal volume with a rather irreverent, “You must be tiring him out with all the great sex.”

There’s an aghast shrill from Mason, a sharp slap and then a yelp from Liam that indicates Theo just smacked him over the back of the head. “Corey will come to you in his own time,” the chimera reassures, though he says it in a tone of carefully cultivated boredom like this is all beneath him. He’s also speaking at a normal volume, but everything Theo does is deliberately considered and there’s no way he’s not aware that Corey can hear him. “All you can do is take care of him and when he’s ready he’ll tell you. Pushing the issue will make it worse. It has to be his decision.” Liam and Mason don’t seem to notice the pointed inflection on the last two words, imperceptible that it is, but Corey does and slumps down in his chair a little bit. Damn Theo for being helpful, now he’ll be all smug and righteous forever.

Liam greets him far too overzealously when the group rounds the stacks to the table, which would have told Corey that they were just talking about him if he hadn’t overheard. How he ever kept his lycanthropy a secret from anybody remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the current era. Mason kisses him on the cheek and slides into the chair next to him, while Theo locks eyes and somehow communicates disapproval, concern and (faux) disinterest with a single twitch of his eyebrow. Corey’s touched. Theo still actively pretends that he hates them most of the time; the closest he ever came to admitting his true sentiments was when he was less than sober, and announced that he wouldn’t be indifferent if they were all maimed horrifically.

The look is exactly what Corey needs to make him understand how dreadfully he’s been treating Mason. He gets on with his work quietly in the meantime, jotting down answers about how Eva apoyó a su marido considerablemente en la política and annotating Ovid with literary devices, but he’s hardly concentrating. The minutes tick by slower than usual and when they finally capitulate to their fatigue just after nine – with only two breakdowns between the four of them, pretty momentous really – Corey feels like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin.

He slips into the passenger seat of Mason’s car, as he does every Thursday so he can be driven home, but when they pull out of the parking lot Corey says, “We should go back to your place.”

Mason looks both ways, joins the road and carefully drives at just below the speed limit before he answers. “Not that I’m complaining, but why?”

“Because we haven’t had sex in like, a month, and that’s a travesty.”

Mason presses on the gas and drives just above the speed limit all the way back.

* * *

To Mason’s credit, he doesn’t launch the Spanish Inquisition until they’re driving in together the next morning. “So,” he says slowly. He’s looking straight ahead at the road but his lips are pursed in thought and his thumbs are doing a little nervous dance on the steering wheel. “Something’s going on.”

It’s not a question, but Corey answers it anyway. “Yes. Nothing...bad.”

Mason lifts his eyes from the windshield at that, just long enough to shoot him an incredulous look that burns down to his blood. “I could feel your ribs,” he points out, “and you’re so pale you’re almost translucent. And you haven’t been sleeping.”

Corey shrinks into his seat. He’s aware of his new status as honorary emaciated raccoon, but he hadn’t thought it was so noticeable to anybody else. “I’m not in trouble,” he finally settles on. “I want to explain but it – it's difficult, and it might be easier if I can show you.”

The car rolls to a stop at a red light, and Mason twists a little in his seat. “It’s up to you,” which makes Corey hate him almost as much he loves him for a moment, for how he always puts himself last to make sure the people he loves are comfortable, “but I’d really like that.”

Corey exhales rapidly, unaware how much tension he’d been storing with the breath. “Okay. After school?”

“Yeah, after school.” The light changes and Mason creeps the car forward as the traffic starts up. “Don’t you have a shift at the restaurant, though?”

“I’ve got the weekend off. Can’t work when you’re sick.”

“You’re a chimera, you can’t get sick.”

“Boss doesn’t know that.” He’s rewarded with a small, genuine smile from Mason. “I’m sorry. For making you worry.”

“It’s my job to worry about you.” Mason grabs his hand and squeezes. “Somebody has to.”

* * *

Corey doesn’t get a chance to shower after lacrosse practice; Mason marches down from the bleachers and yanks him straight from the goal to his car, ignoring Liam’s spluttering and Theo’s knowing smirk. “I smell really bad,” he tries to protest as his boyfriend trots them both into the parking lot.

“You smell great,” Mason says, “you smell like sweat and boy. I like those smells.”

Corey wrinkles his nose. “You’re so strange.” He has to admit that he’s rather partial to a freshly-out-of-gym Mason himself, but that’s forty-five minutes of light activity as opposed to two hours flinging himself around in the mud wearing a full suit of lacrosse gear. 

There are a few other students getting into their own cars, or their parents’. A couple wave goodbye as they pass, and in a strange role reversal Corey is the one to wave back while Mason ignores them. He’s only ever seen Mason this oblivious to the world around him when sex or bestiaries are involved. Maybe he should try and combine the two for a birthday present. He could dress up as a dusty old tome and recite entries about manticores and dragons while Mason pounds him. Perfect.

“So we’ll call in at yours and then go back to mine.” Mason is planning aloud as he slides into the driver’s seat, pulling Corey away from his roleplay ideas. “My parents will be home about eight so we’ll have a few hours to ourselves. They’re planning some kind of stew for dinner, by the way. They’ve never made it before, so prepare for that.” Mason’s parents fluctuate between wild success and total failure when it comes to new recipes, never landing in the middle ground of ‘it’s okay I guess’. Corey’s been witness and guinea pig to both sides of the coin.

They still don’t talk about the parsnip soup.

* * *

With Mason idling outside his house, Corey throws himself up the stairs and robs The Graveyard. Armed with five duffel bags – two holding translated files, two not yet done, and one with the less important stuff like his clothes and toiletries so he doesn’t end up treating the Hewitts’ house as his own personal nudist colony – and his laptop, he flies back down and bounces straight off the frame as he tries to go back out of the front door. The duffel bags are holding him hostage. They’ve made him too thick to get out of the door. They all knew this day would come, but nobody expected it to come so soon.

He’s not sure if Mason saw that, or his two subsequent failed attempts to squeeze out of the door, but if he did he doesn’t say anything when Corey dumps his bags in the backseat and throws himself into the front. He does shoot him a brilliant smile and mutter, “I love you,” before he starts reversing, which makes Corey’s heart thud a little bit harder for a few seconds, and also makes him think that Mason did see the entire scene.

The drive to Mason’s is fifteen minutes, the radio humming away in the background as Mason rants breathlessly about conservation of angular momentum and Corey tries frantically to understand one single word of what he’s saying. This is probably what he sounds like when he goes on about French idioms, he realises, and vows to do so less often in the future because it’s just bewildering. It’s nice seeing Mason worked up over something non-supernatural, though, because as cute as it is when he spends hours reading about unicorns and then regurgitates the knowledge in a thrilled daze, Corey kind of wishes that their lives could be more like the other teenagers around them. Fewer assassination attempts and more acne.

Actually, he’ll take the assassination attempts.

Mason shoos him straight up to the shower when they get in, stripping Corey down in the least erotic stripping that he’s ever been involved with, and then marching off with a valiant declaration of, “I’m going to wash these,” like it’s a Herculean task to put lacrosse gear in a machine and turn it on.

Corey holds back his snide remark about how he could have showered at school if someone hadn’t been so eager to get him to leave, mostly because the showers at school don’t have three shower heads or the weird Salvador Dali print on the wall that often hypnotises him as he washes. He just fishes out some sweatpants and a hoodie that may or may not actually be one of Mason’s that he stoleborrowed last year and trundles off obediently.

The living room has been engulfed by a blanket fort when he pads downstairs, clean and scrubbed pink. It’s comfortably wide inside once he crawls in, the wooden floor covered in throw cushions and more blankets, Mason’s laptop at one end playing from his Spotify and fading between various aesthetic screensavers. Strings of lights line the blanket that’s acting as the ceiling, tented high enough so that it’s not claustrophobic but still low enough to be cosy. Mason himself is seated cross-legged with part of a faux-fur afghan over his shoulders, a bowl of popcorn and two bottles of coke just behind him.

Mason is an expert in many things – from calculus to slug identification – and it looks like making blanket forts is going to be added to the list.

Corey yields to the impulse to kiss Mason senseless, scrambling into his lap and whining when Mason resolutely pulls back after fifteen minutes and says, with a determination in his tone that doesn’t reach his eyes, “No, we have to talk.”

Corey falls gracelessly onto his back, propping his elbow up and wriggling his fingers. Mason accepts the invitation and copies his pose before seizing his hand, interlacing their fingers. He tilts his head to look at him, grimaces momentarily and leans over for one final kiss. “You need to stop looking at me like that,” he says, with a tormented expression.

“Like what?” Corey asks innocently, fully aware that he’s leant his head back just enough so his gaze is hooded and his smile is ever so slightly crooked, pulling up more on the left side of his face than the right. Mason’s been a sucker for it ever since that kiss in the locker room after their first date, when he adamantly declared they weren’t going on another and then cupped his hands around Corey’s jaw so he could kiss him deeper. And then decided that yeah, they were going out again, he’d pick Corey up at seven.

“Like that,” Mason insists. His free hand comes to a rest on Corey’s hip. He can feel it acutely through the thin fabric of his sweatpants, burning hot and making him shiver at the same time. “It’s like, sexy puppy dog eyes.”

That makes Corey snort, involuntarily screwing his face up into a grin. “Okay, I’m sorry. No more sexy puppy dog eyes.”

“That’s not much better,” Mason protests, eyes raking over Corey’s face. His expression has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it tug of war with itself and then he rolls over, partially on top of him, and leans down to kiss him again. Corey’s only too happy to let it happen, and then keep happening as it turns into making out. At least until Mason recoils like he’s been shocked with a pathetic groan and drops their foreheads together. “That face makes me want to kiss you too,” he complains.

“Maybe you just always want to kiss me,” Corey suggests. He can feel Mason hard against his stomach, and he’s eager to do something about that, preferably with fewer layers between them – but nope, Mason pushes up and away, shifting back to where he was.

“That is very true,” he confesses, “but you have some explaining to do first.”

“I do,” Corey agrees mournfully, and scrubs his hands over his face to gather his thoughts. “I need you – can you do something for me first?”

“Anything,” Mason says instantly, whole body molten with affection.

“I need you to not be nice about this.” Mason’s eyes widen, and he murmurs something about splitting infinitives, but otherwise he stays silent while Corey fumbles in his brain for the right words. “I’ve been a dick, and I need you to hold me culpable for that.”

“You haven’t-”

“I have, I’ve been really shitty. I’ve been a bad boyfriend and a bad friend, and just a bad person generally, and I’m going to feel guilty about that unless you accept it and forgive me for it. If you don’t it’s just going to fester inside of me like...I don’t know, like a fungus. Like that one that eats ants’ brains.”

“Ophiocordyceps unilateralis?” Mason supplies.

“Why the fuck do you know that.”

“How could I ever forget?” Mason visibly catches himself and tones down the passion. “Um, okay. You’ve been a dick. It’s not been great. But I forgive you, and I missed you, but I still love you.”

In one of the many ways Corey identifies with the Grinch, his heart grows three sizes. It’s precisely what he needed to hear. “I love you too,” he says automatically. “Okay, um. So, it was after the whole...Dread Doctors and thing with the Beast.”

* * *

It’s almost an hour to explain the events of the past year and a bit. Corey’s laptop wheezes away at one end of the den, decoding software still up on the screen from Mason’s fervent exploration, and a couple of translated files lie on either side of it that he’d also pawed through.

Mason is still gawking at one of the files he hasn’t gotten around to translating yet, finger hovering over the jumble of words like he’s able to divine some meaning from it. They’re both sitting upright now, backs supported by mounds of cushions and beanbags scrounged from the den, and with every silent second that ticks by Corey’s anxiety whirrs into new flurries.

“This is amazing,” Mason finally says, closing the folder delicately and placing it out of harm’s way. “I mean, this is literal history that you’re making right here. Translating their work so others can learn from it? And learning a whole language from scratch to do it and decoding all of this, that’s just...this is so intense, Corey. And you are – amazing.”

Corey tucks one knee up towards his chest, chewing on his lip. This isn’t the reaction he was prepared for, and now he feels like he’s unmoored. Anger is familiar and simple; praise is not. “You’re not mad?” he asks uncertainly.

Mason, eyes still fixed on the duffel bags just outside the entrance to the fort, shakes his head. “Of course not! I mean, I’m mad about the Dread Doctors and everything they did, and I don’t like that it made you unwell, but I’m so proud of you.” Corey ducks his head to his knee to hide the sting of tears while Mason babbles. “I’m just worried about how you must be feeling, I can see the physical toll it took on you, but mentally? This must have been...exhausting.” He shifts, or at least turns his head, because all at once his tone and chemosignals change and soften. “Oh, no, Corey. I’m sorry. I’m not mad, I swear. It’s just my job to worry about you, remember?”

His mouth won’t function for a few sections, but then Corey manages to explain, “I’m just overwhelmed, give me a minute,” and Mason shuffles closer and wraps his hands around Corey’s where they’re clutching at his thigh because he always knows just what to do. “Ugh, I’m sorry,” he says a few minutes later, voice thick with tears, looking up into Mason’s kind face, kinder than he deserves. “I was expecting you to be upset, and then you weren’t, so I just didn’t know how to deal.”

Mason produces a box of tissues from behind the bowl of popcorn – apparently he’d rightly assumed that whatever Corey needed to tell him about was going to cause an influx of emotions – and wipes at his cheeks tenderly as he talks. “I hate that you don’t take care of yourself,” he admits quietly, “but I get why this is so important to you. Just...let me help? Even if it’s just reminding you to eat, or sleep. Don’t shut me out.”

Corey nods, not trusting his voice among the surge of guilt. He knows that Mason’s worst nightmare is being helpless to those he loves, and there he was merrily making that nightmare a reality. But it doesn’t have to be - “Actually, you could help me with the files. They keep using weird medical terms and talking about ‘contraindicators’ and stuff. You probably understand it.”

Mason brightens incrementally as he speaks. By the end he’s beaming. “I’d love that! You translate from Greek and I’ll translate from medical.” He seems so genuinely delighted by the prospect that a laugh bubbles out of Corey, and he has to hide his face back in his knee with the force of it. Mason tries to coax him out with caresses, and failing that knocks him back in a gentle tackle to kiss him.

This time, Mason is all too willing to let Corey peel off his pants.

* * *

Life settles into a new routine after that. There’s still school and AP classes, shifts at work, lacrosse practices and studying together on a Thursday, but now there’s Saturday mornings in the blanket fort piecing together the details of the Dread Doctors’ experiments. (The blanket fort in the living room was dismantled when Mason’s parents came home that same Friday, but Mason reconstructed it in the never-used study.) Sundays are still stubbornly reserved for dates.

Reading through the files isn’t so awful now. The horrors seem far-removed, the lair not in the sewers underneath their town but on another planet, and Corey can almost kid himself that none of this ever really happened. It helps that Mason is there with him, sprawled with his laptop in front of him, a medical dictionary to is right and whatever file he’s working on to his left. Corey usually situates himself similarly, angled away so their books don’t overlap but close enough that the lines of their bodies are pressed together from ankle to hip. The contact is grounding. 

Mason likes it too; unable to detect chemosignals and heartbeats, he has to rely on feeling Corey’s body tense or his breath stutter as he stumbles through something particularly triggering. He goes beyond an anchor and becomes bedrock while they’re working, reaching over to grasp Corey’s trembling hand when he can’t shake away the memories of vivisections and mercury spilling from his mouth. 

He probably assumes that’s why Corey has suddenly turned to stone, scooting over and hooking his chin over Corey’s shoulder to glance over at the file. But then he freezes, too, eyes locking on the word that Corey had just scribbled down without really thinking about it – invisible.

Mason’s been keeping a list of all the files, jotting down the number that the Doctors had designated to each experiment – person – and then the species that had resulted. They’re over halfway through now, at least a hundred lines of ‘CHIMERA 12 - Werewolf/Raiju’ and ‘CHIMERA 107 – Berserker/Werecoyote’. They never found Theo’s file, the first chimera to be made, but Mason had added him anyway, and with the exception of a few odd numbers missing here and there, they’re slowly gaining the bigger picture of what centuries of research had led to.

The Doctors, scientists at heart if deeply flawed megalomaniacs with God complexes, documented their subjects and experiments thoroughly. Every file begins with a brief description of the teenager they’d kidnapped, followed by a detailed run-down of how they’d transformed the genetic chimeras into supernatural chimeras (which was exactly the same each time, blah blah blah modified mercury infusions blah blah blah buried alive), and then finally the big reveal – the manifested creatures and abilities. And then the finale, all about how the teenagers had rejected the mercury and suffered in varied and horrific ways before the Doctors removed them from their experiment pool with a mercy killing, even if that mercy wasn’t graciously gifted from the kindness of their hearts.

He’d skimmed through the description of this file, having learnt the hard way that it was better to read but not absorb whatever he was working on. Tracy wasn’t the first werewolf-kanima file he found, but the description made it painfully obvious that it was hers. He’d shuttered his brain to the words since then. But now he reels back, to check if it could be him, in case werechameleons were springing up like mushrooms at one point and he has some long-lost pseudo-siblings out there.

‘CHIMERA 113 – DEEMED FAILURE. TERMINATED.’ simmers at the top of the page like a brand.

It could be him. It probably is him. Corey is suddenly infinitely more terrified. “I don’t think I can do this,” he confesses, hushed words falling from his mouth and spilling into the stand-still air between them.

“You can.” Mason’s voice is distorted and distant, like Corey’s underwater and Mason’s on dry land. “You have to.”

You have to.

He scribbles down the last word and hands the file over to Mason, body slumping. His shoulders have been relieved of their burden, but the weight on them has also increased exponentially. Each word was a marathon to translate, and he feels like he’s been punched in the gut until he’s split open by the paper and ink.

Mason reads aloud, more for his own benefit than Corey’s. The words can become like a leaden weight in your stomach if you bottle them inside. He fixes his free hand on the small of Corey’s back, warm through his shirt. Just enough contact but not too much. “Subject is a white male, brown hair and of average height and build. Subject has no strong connections to family or friends, and underwent a transplant of the liver at a young age. Subject is clearly mentally unstable as shown through abuse of substances such as alcohol and drugs, and casual promiscuity.” He clears his throat. “Wow, they, uh. Really didn’t hold back.”

“That’s not it.” That’s not why I’m splintering into a thousand tiny fractals.

“Subject has gained ability to become invisible. Likely correlation to the common myth surrounding the chameleon. Second species is – oh. Corey.”

“Say it.” He needs the affirmation. He’s not a great reader, after all.

“Second species is unknown. Abilities are also unknown.” Mason exhales and places the file down in front of them, slowly, delicately. Every move is an act of war or a declaration of peace in that moment. “Corey-”

“They didn’t-” It feels like an insult, somehow. That even his creators, because that’s what they were, right? Even his creators saw him as so worthless of time and attention that they didn’t investigate him as thoroughly as the others. The same powerless obscurity that’s haunted him all of his life, that gave him his powers and transformed him into something discernible - has triumphed over him once again. Maybe he didn’t present as obviously, no fangs or claws to signify the common shifts, but – irrational as it is - he feels just as unseen as he used to.

“-they didn’t care.” It’s a nonsensical statement, of course they didn’t care, nobody ever imagined for a second that they did – but there must be something showing on Corey’s face that elucidates what he’s trying to say, or at least just exemplifies the sheer depth of his distress, because Mason’s own expression crumples.

“This isn’t what defines you.” Mason shifts closer and cups Corey’s face in his hands, strong but gentle fingers placing him back together one shard at a time. “You are Corey, and you are amazing in your own right.”

Corey closes his eyes and leans into the touch, relishes the points of contact for the muted fireworks they’re sending through his skin. “I have to know,” he whispers, a broken confession. “I have to know what I am.”

“Okay,” Mason whispers back. He gathers Corey in his arms to stop him from rattling apart. “Okay. This isn’t the end. We can still do this. We can figure this out. I’ll do some research, and you can keep on trying to find new powers, and – and we can do this. We will do this.”

* * *

They don’t really talk about it again, not for a while. They keep translating – for the sake of posterity, Mason insists, and Corey suspects that he’s planning to bind the results into a book with leather covers and a title in gold-embossed gothic font – but they finish about two weeks before the end of the winter semester. Just enough time to study for the first lot of exams, Mason proclaims cheerfully, and forces Corey to revise until he feels like someone’s pulled out his brain, pulverised it and then shoved it back in through his ears. 

He barely sleeps over the last week of the semester, uses up all of his remaining holiday leave from work, and generally loses track of reality. Mason doesn’t fare much better, convinced against all odds that he’s going to fail as he is every exam season. Liam’s IED spins out of control with his anxiety, and there are several occasions where the claws spring out and puncture through whatever paper he’s panicking over or gore ink free from a pen. Theo’s the only one who remains calm throughout it all, talking Liam down from homicidal rampages, reassuring Mason of his own brilliance, and patiently listening to Corey reciting his speech for Spanish for the umpteenth time.

Corey tumbles from his last exam to lacrosse practice and then to the restaurant without the chance to take a break. He’s on closing tonight, the perfect start to Christmas break, so he ends up wiping tables and organising the walk-in and double-checking that the security system is activated until almost three in the morning. The buses don’t run this late and he’s a fair distance from his house, but Mason’s is under a mile away and he’s already been told in no uncertain terms that he’ll be spending the holidays with the Hewitts. Half of his clothes live there already anyway, and the bathroom cabinet has a little wicker basket of toiletries reserved for him.

Someone lays on their car horn as he’s locking the restaurant’s doors behind him, and when he twists around there’s a Toyota pulled up by the curb, Vanessa Hewitt beaming behind the wheel. 

“Mason wanted to come and get you,” she explains once he’s joined her inside the heated vehicle, “but Ben enrolled him into making cookies, and they lost track of time.”

“Thank you,” and then because Corey’s mouth doesn’t know when to stop, “I could have walked.”

The withering state from Vanessa is entirely expected but still makes him wince. “I don’t care if you’re a creature of the night, like hell you’re walking by yourself in the pitch black,” she reprimands. “Especially when you’ve been on your feet all day, honestly.” She trails off into mutters about boys not having any common sense as she fiddles with the radio and eventually lands on a station playing carols. 

“It’s really kind of you,” Corey settles for, after struggling to find words that can express the volume of his gratitude. He’s spent most of his breaks with the Hewitts; Christmas with just them and New Year with the extended clan, helping decorate the hospital’s paediatric ward for Easter over spring, and travelling to Europe over summer, but the weight of their kindness still suffocates him sometimes.

“It’s entirely selfish,” Vanessa says merrily. “You make very good roast potatoes, and I’ve been craving them for weeks. I plan on trapping you in the kitchen every evening until you make me an entire plate of them.”

“I’ll make you two plates,” he counter-offers, “if you make tiramisu.”

“You drive a hard bargain.” They pull into the Hewitt’s driveway and park. “But you have a deal.” They shake on it.

Mason is, true to Vanessa’s words, toiling over a countertop’s worth of cookie dough when they walk into the kitchen. He’s covered in flour and there’s a carefully stacked Jenga-esque tower of eggshells next to him, probably some kind of weird physics game he’s playing with himself. Benjamin has the biggest mixing bowl that Corey’s ever seen on the counter and is frowning into it, querying himself on how much vanilla essence he should use. 

Vanessa steals two cooling cookies from the veritable mountain that’s already been baked and sits at the island with Corey while they wait for their presence to be noticed. They’re on a second portion before Mason turns around and shouts in wordless delight, and then he comes over to kiss Corey on the cheek and apologise that he didn’t pick him up, he must have lost track of time, and he hopes his mom didn’t say anything traumatising with a pointed look towards Vanessa. He still isn’t quite over the safe sex lecture that they’d been subjected to last year.

Despite being on the brink of collapse not even fifteen minutes ago, Corey brightens among the familial chatter and warm atmosphere, and only crashes again when he’s brushing his teeth and has to be half-dragged to bed by Mason. Nobody bothered to make up the spare bed, past the point of pretending that Corey wasn’t just going to turn himself invisible and slip into Mason’s room anyway, so they collapse onto Mason’s bed together and sleep in until midday.

Corey probably would have slept well into the evening if he’d been allowed to, but Mason squirms his way free from his embrace and then clatters around the room, deliberately cacophonously, until Corey’s forced to admit consciousness and opens his eyes blearily. Mason is positioning his whiteboard in front of the bed, the one he got for Christmas last year and uses for everything from supernatural investigations to solving physics equations in his spare time.

There’s something scribbled on it. It looks like a mind-map. Corey hasn’t been awake long enough for this bullshit. He immediately feels bad about that, and mentally amends the statement. He hasn’t been awake long enough for this knowledge that Mason has lovingly researched and is now planning to present for his benefit.

Corey pushes himself up and sits cross-legged as Mason putters about, wishing someone would bring him coffee or a sledgehammer to the head. 

“Okay,” Mason says to himself, eyes wandering over the whiteboard. Then louder, “Have you heard of esotericism?” 

“You know I haven’t.”

Mason looks fond rather than disheartened at Corey’s lack of knowledge. It’s a nice change. “So, it’s basically the study of occult and spiritual viewpoints, right?” He points out those exact same words on the board. “And there’s this branch called esoteric cosmology, which is what it sounds like. It’s cosmology that’s part of this esoteric viewpoint, so like mystical astronomy, basically. Yeah?”

Corey isn’t entirely lost, so he nods.

“So, in esoteric cosmology, there are different planes of existence. Usually seven, though Buddhists believe there are thirty-one – but we’ll stick to the seven for now so your head doesn’t explode.”

“You know me so well.”

Mason indicates a picture of a cake that he’s taped to his board. “It’s like this cake – there's seven layers, and there’s icing in between them, so they’re not actually touching but they’re all part of the cake itself. They’re all related and part of the same thing, but they’re separate and distinct.” He checks to see if Corey has understood his spiritual cake analogy before he continues. “All of the layers correspond to different types of beings and... realms of consciousness, I guess, is the easiest way to describe them. The heaviest planes are at the bottom and they get lighter as they go up.”

“Like air?” Corey checks. “You know, hot air is lighter so it rises. Or is it the other way around?”

“No, that’s it.” Mason looks extremely proud that Corey understands a basic physics concept. Corey wants to be offended, but he’s honestly pretty proud of himself too. “Now, our plane is the heaviest, so it’s right at the bottom.” He moves to the other side of the board so he can reveal a neat pyramid he’s drawn. The bottom segment has ‘PHYSICAL’ written inside it. “This is where we are right now; it’s the plane that the physical human body occupies. Usually it’s where our souls are, too.”

“Usually?”

Mason points at him triumphantly – clearly that was the question he wanted Corey to ask. “The next plane up is the astral plane.” Mason, dramatic as he is, whips a piece of plain paper away from the next level of the pyramid to reveal ‘ASTRAL’. “That’s where your consciousness goes after physical death, so it’s populated by spirits.”

“Oh, like astral projection!”

“Exactly! You know about that?”

“I’ve seen some jokes about it on Tumblr.”

“Good enough!” There’s an arrow pointing out from ‘ASTRAL’ towards another picture, this one of someone lying down with their eyes closed while a grey, shadowy figure stands over them. “It’s when you project your consciousness out of your body while you’re still alive, and your consciousness then occupies the astral plane. Which means that everyone has an astral body.”

“And that’s where I go when I turn invisible?”

“I think so. I can’t be sure, but it would make sense. It’s meant to be just like ours, pretty much a copy but empty except for spirits or anybody else who happens to be astral projecting.”

“I’ve never seen anybody else there, apart from the Ghost Riders.”

“Mm, well, there’s a few different schools of thought. The most prevalent and accepted is that only spirits that are unable to cross over roam the astral plane, those are the ones we typically think of as ghosts. The ones with unfinished business, or that died violent deaths, they stick around, but the others go to some sort of afterlife.”

“So there’s just not that many of them?”

“Apparently not, though I’d have thought that Beacon Hills would have a massive population of them, there are so many violent deaths in this town.

“Anyway, there’s also the mental plane, that one has seven sub-planes of its own, which were fascinating to read about! Did you know-” He sees Corey’s face and stops himself. “Anyway, then there’s the Buddhic plane,” he pulls away more paper, “and that’s a plane of pure consciousness. On top of that is the spiritual plane - or the Atmic plane - but that’s for spiritual beings that are more advanced than humans, not human spirits. Then there’s the divine plane, that’s where deities reside, and at the top is the logoic plane.” Each name gets its own dramatic reveal from underneath a paper shield, because Mason is not one to half-ass things. In contrast to Corey’s usual technique of barely-assing things, Mason is a full-ass kind of man. “It’s a plane of total oneness. Some people call that the monadic plane, which is the plane where there is a totality of all beings without division.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Mason looks torn between explaining it further and accepting it as a lost cause. He settles for the latter after a few seconds. A wise decision, really. “Uh, doesn’t matter. All you really need to know is that when you turn invisible, you’re actually accessing the next plane up from ours.”

“Right.” Corey doesn’t see the significance of that – it's pretty cool, sure, but he doesn’t see how it relates to anything else. It’s mostly just freaking him out.

“But here’s the thing,” Mason steamrolls on, “you don’t completely cross over! You’re invisible on one plane and visible on the other, but you’re tangible on both. There’s some kind of funky interdimensional straddling going on here.”

Ooh. Well, Corey can get behind that, if that’s the phrase they’re going to be using. He waves his hand to urge Mason on, realising a beat too late that he looks like royalty gracing a peasant with their acknowledgement. Mason doesn’t falter, because he doesn’t notice, too busy flipping the board over to show the other side which has even more information scrawled all over it.

“So, I started thinking about creatures that are associated with dimensional manipulation, specifically ones that can exist on one than more plane. Or interfere with more than one. I have a couple of theories, but the first one is...” Mason slaps his hand onto the new board and rips away another piece of paper to reveal:

“Fae!”

Corey blinks. “You think I’m a fairy?” An obvious gay joke springs to mind but he doubts Mason would appreciate it right now. He’ll tell him later, when he’s not so excited, and then Mason will laugh at the joke and praise him for his self-control. Score one for Corey.

“Possibly.” Mason turns to his board and starts stroking over the information he’s gathered. Corey debates leaving the two of them alone for a moment. “But not like the ones in children’s book. Fae are...they’re kind of terrifying. But fascinating!”

“Isn’t there a thing where they can’t lie, or something?” Corey only knows that because Liam got hit with an errant truth spell a few months ago after accidentally pissing off a witch they were asking for help, and Theo had made an off-hand comment about how Liam was basically a fairy now, to which Liam had unwillingly replied that he thought fairies were pretty cool and he’d love to have wings. It was an interesting day.

“They can’t outright lie, but they can twist words, and deceive, and just generally be...I don’t know, a bit manipulative.” Mason sounds like he’s in awe. Corey knows him well enough to know that he absolutely is. “There’s also this cool thing about names. If one of the Fae knows your full name, they have control over you. But it works both ways! So people who interact with the Fae always use a fake name, and the Fae do too. But if you lie to them they get super pissed off, so you have to be really careful how you speak. You can’t say ‘my name is so-and-so', you have to say ‘you can call me so-and-so'. It’s so cool!” Mason is practically vibrating.

Corey’s still trying to process the whole being a fairy thing. Is he going to sprout wings suddenly? What if he’s like Tinkerbell and needs attention to live? Well, that’s already true, to be fair. 

“Anyway, there are loads of different types of Fae. I’ve been reading about all of them, and they all have slightly different powers and abilities. If you are Fae, then we can try to narrow it down.” 

Corey glances at the board. A glance is all he needs – he reads alven, devas, pixies, dryads, sprites, nymphs, (Un)Seelies and is immediately overwhelmed. “Are leprechauns fairies?” The thought pops into his head from nowhere.

“Uh, yeah, actually. Why?”

“My great-grandfather was Irish.” Sometimes Corey is a genuine dumbass. Sometimes he likes to pretend to be a dumbass, mostly because of the stunned face that Mason gives him in return, the one he’s doing now. It’s so worth having people think you’re even more stupid than you actually are when you get to see such bemused expressions.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mason says faintly, but he eyes Corey suspiciously because he’s fully aware that if he’s being particularly dense, it’s likely an act. Unless it’s to do with maths, in which case it never is. Corey just doesn’t get maths – use geometry to prove this is a triangle, it has three sides of course it’s a triangle what do you want from me. “Anyway.” He physically shakes himself from the dazed stupor Corey had induced and moves to his desk. After rummaging in a drawer for a few seconds, he emerges with two dull silver bars, slender and about the length of his forearm. “Here’s the test.” He proffers them to Corey.

The one he takes in his right hand is fine, just a little heavy, but the one he takes in his left burns as soon as his skin makes contact. He swears and drops it automatically. It sits on Mason’s duvet like butter wouldn’t melt even as Corey’s palm boils, blisters, and heals over. “What was that?”

Mason, every line on his face filled with apology, drops to his knees and examines Corey’s hand. He presses a quick kiss to the wound site, now completely vanished. “That was iron. Pure iron. The one you’re still holding,” he nods to Corey’s right hand, “is steel. Iron with carbon.”

“So pure iron is...bad? For fairies?”

“The Fae can’t stand pure iron,” Mason confirms. “In large enough quantities, it can even kill them.” His expression is far, far too gleeful to be talking about death. “Okay, can you try again, but invisible? Just to make sure?”

Corey obliges, switching hands and feeling the same searing sensation on his right palm. He phases back into visibility just in time to show Mason the healing burn, which he again kisses in apology before springing back to the board and scribbling excitedly. “You just went to another dimension!” he exclaims. His voice is a touch maniacal, which is a bit of a role reversal. Kind of like when a woman goes into labour and her husband starts freaking out. “You’re the coolest motherfucker on this planet.”

Mason rarely swears. Corey plays a fun game with himself sometimes, called ‘How Many Times Can I Make Mason Swear During Sex’, and so far the record is five. Aside from that, he can count on one hand the times he’s heard anything more vulgar than ‘crap’. It’s presumably a testament to how worked up he is. 

“Babe?” he pipes up. Mason flutters a hand in response. “Maybe we should...have a break? Sit down for a moment?” He’s never witnessed anyone cause themselves a heart attack from sheer exhilaration, but he might be about to.

“We haven’t confirmed it yet,” Mason counters. “We need to go to the preserve, to the creek. Fae can’t cross running water.” He caps his whiteboard pen with a flourish.

Maybe if they run around in the woods for a bit Mason will work off this excess energy. Having a boyfriend is so easy, it’s just like taking care of a Golden Retriever. “Yeah, alright, let’s get dressed and go.”

Mason zooms towards his wardrobe and pulls clothes out at an alarming rate, throwing some over to Corey and pelting him in the face with a pair of jeans and then a single sock. “This is so cool,” he enthuses, pulling a T-shirt on inside out, then back-to front, then inside out again. Presumably this is the shirt’s fault, because Mason throws it aside and its replacement is wrangled into submission easily. 

“You are way more excited about this than you should be,” Corey says. It’s not meant to be a reprimand, but with the way Mason freezes it would seem he’s interpreted it as such. “I mean, it’s great, I just don’t get why,” he backtracks, “because I’d like to find out myself, but I’m nowhere near as worked up as you.”

Mason pads over to sit next to him, eyes bright with emotion and one sock only half-pulled on. “Because, Corey,” he says softly, like he’s sharing a sacred truth, “whatever you are, it’s incredible. You’re incredible. I don’t think you realise how much.”

Corey scoffs and tilts his head away automatically, but Mason is well-versed in his small idiosyncrasies by now and catches his chin to abort the movement. “I think you’re overestimating me.”

“I think you’re underestimating yourself.” Either aware that Corey is very decidedly not in the mood for a self-esteem booster session, or not able to contain his energy for much longer, Mason kisses him quickly and then springs to his feet. “Come on, theories to test out.”

Well, there’s another roleplay idea. He’ll be a sexy hypothesis that’s so complex only Dr. Mason stands a chance of proving it. That can be for Christmas next year.

* * *

The creek is flowing gently; definitely not still, but not fast either. “Will this work?” Corey asks uncertainly, eyeing the clear water. He can see the mud and moss underneath the ripples, and is glad that they found a narrow point so he can just step straight over to the other side of the preserve.

“Yeah, it’s just any body of water that isn’t like, a puddle or a lake or whatever,” Mason says. “There’s some contention about whether the ocean counts, but-” He catches himself. “Never mind. This counts.”

“Okay,” Corey says, and then repeats it under his breath to himself. No big deal, he might just discover the secrets of his own life. Maybe he should close his eyes – that's what people do when they’re on the cusp of a huge discovery, right? But then he’d probably fall over. Eyes open it is.

Well. That was anticlimactic, to say the least. One stride and he’s on the opposite bank, creek cleared easily. “Um,” he says, and spins on his heel to gauge Mason’s reaction. His boyfriend is staring at the space that Corey just covered, nodding to himself. “So, not a fae? Unless...” He fades away until the world is tinged green and a bit wobbly around the edges, and tries again. “Never mind,” he sighs, appearing back where he started.

Mason is still staring at the creek. “I mean, you are only part whatever-this-is, so it might not be as strong?” he reasons, but he doesn’t sound convinced himself. “Can you touch it?”

Corey realises a second too late that Mason probably meant for him to stick his hand in or something, not wade into the tepid creek and splash around experimentally. At least he thought to toe his shoes off first, and now he rolls up his jeans so he’s bare from the knee down. When he glances up, Mason has frozen with his hands out to try and stop him, expression between poleaxed and amused.

“Not what I meant, but it works.” His voice is a little strangled. He’s either unbelievably aroused from the sight of Corey’s bare ankles, or suppressing laughter. Either is possible. Corey is proud of his ankles.

“So, we’re ruling out Fae?” he says instead of fishing for compliments about his shapely calves. “I think this would be impossible if there was any Fae in me, right?”

Mason’s face morphs into something vaguely like a leer, only saved from that fate because he’s grinning proudly at the same time. “I’ll change my name to Fae if you’d like there to be.”

“No,” Corey refutes immediately, “no, that was terrible, you are never allowed to use pick-up lines again.” Mason is clearly pleased with himself, laughing at his own wit and Corey’s indignancy, but he lowers himself down to a seat on the bank.

“No, I don’t think you’ve got any Fae,” he agrees, “but don’t worry. Like I said, I have another theory. I want to do some more research first, but...it’s promising.”

All of Corey’s good-natured annoyance over Mason’s horrible attempts at flirting melt away. “Thank you,” he says softly. “For all of this.”

“Are you kidding me?” The words practically trip over themselves in Mason’s enthusiasm. “I love doing all this research and I love you, this is basically a dream come true.”

Aware that he’s still standing in a muddy creek with damp jeans rolled up to his knees and moss tickling between his toes, Corey makes absolutely no move to leave. “Say that again.”

Mason grins at him, unashamedly full of adoration. “I love doing all of this research.”

“The other part.”

“This is basically a dream come true.” He chuckles at the unimpressed glare Corey directs at him and then pushes back up to his feet – bare feet, he nudged his sneakers off while he was sitting – and marches to the edge of the bank.

“Oh no, Mason! Don’t go in the water with your nice pants, huh!” His voice pitches higher as the sentence ends, watching helplessly as Mason does indeed hop into the creek beside him. His pants wick water all the way up to his thighs and his feet squelch in the mud, but he’s smiling.

“I’d rather be in here with you and get my pants wet than be alone with dry pants.”

“I think that sounded more romantic in your head.”

“Oh, yeah, totally.” Corey’s mid-laugh when Mason kisses him, slow and deep and narrowing the world down to just the two of them. “I love you,” he says when he breaks away. His voice is gravelly and sends a pleasant thrum down Corey’s spine.

“I love you too.” Corey’s a slave to his impulses, incapable of doing anything but kiss him again. “But I’m starting to get cold.”

“Mm, we should get out of here.” Mason scrambles back onto the bank and then offers his arm to help Corey out after him, grimacing as a chilled breeze turns the moisture on their legs frigid. He glances between their muddy feet and dirt-speckled legs. “Maybe we should shower together when we get back. You know, for conservation and all that.”

“It’s only fair to the polar bears,” Corey agrees, and tries to keep his balance as Mason whisks them back to the car eagerly, clutching their shoes in his free hand and ignoring the scandalised elderly hikers who notice their bare feet and call after them about splinters.

* * *

Mason guards his whiteboard zealously over the next week, flicking through ancient, massive books and copying information onto the side turned away from the bed. He instructs Corey to avert his eyes when he comes in and out of the room, and even drapes a sheet over it at night. It’s as much because Mason wants to have a big dramatic reveal when he’s ready as it is to save Corey from getting his hopes up prematurely, and Corey loves him for it.

He also doesn’t mind – Mason has a TV and console in his room that has Netflix, Amazon Prime, and a thousand other streaming platforms on it, so he spends most of the time flat on his stomach on the bed watching documentaries. He stumbles upon one about yeti crabs and then another about spook fish, which leads him to undersea lakes and caves with air pockets, and now he’s in the middle of one about goblin sharks. He keeps skipping back to watch the footage of it again and again, fascinated by its jaw protruding out from its mouth to snatch at its prey and wondering idly if he could train himself to do that. He’s on the fifth or sixth rewind when Mason suddenly surges up from his desk to scribble something on the board. It’s become pretty standard behaviour over the past few days, so while the movement in his peripheral vision prompts his attention, Corey doesn’t look twice. He does when Mason suddenly sprints out of the room, though, because. Well. That’s not exactly abnormal behaviour, but it’s definitely not normal either.

He pauses the documentary after a moment’s hesitation. At the very least, he needs to be prepared if there’s some supernatural threat headed their way, or if, more importantly, Mason is foraging for snacks in the kitchen. He can hear cupboard doors swinging open and slamming shut again, so it’s a reasonable hope. He hasn’t eaten for like, two hours. He can feel himself wasting away.

Mason doesn’t bring snacks back with him. He looks very excited with his haul, though – two cylindrical containers, one red and one blue. “Salt!” he declares as he charges back into the room, setting the red one down on his desk and then hauling Corey to his feet ungracefully. He steers him to a clear spot on the floor and then begins shaking the salt out in a circle around him. 

Corey endures in patient silence. There’s a method to the madness, he knows, and Mason will share that method when the madness is no longer in control. When the circle joins itself, having come full-circle, Mason reseals the container and jumps back. “Okay, try stepping out.”

Corey steps out as easily as – well, as easily as you’d expect someone to step out of a ring of salt. Mason doesn’t look disappointed, though, just grabs the red container and repeats the process around his new location. “Here we go,” he says under his breath, and nods to Corey.

This time, Corey can’t pass it. He doesn’t get thrown back or anything dramatic, or even shocked or stunned – his legs just won’t pass the salt, like there’s a wall there. He pushes against it with his hands, but it doesn’t budge. It extends right from the floor where the salt is as far as he can reach. “What the fuck,” he says, spinning on the spot like that will disable whatever’s happening here.

“I knew it!” Mason near-explodes in triumph, darting over to his whiteboard and wheeling it out of its Corner of Secrecy. He twists it around so the side he’s been annotating is facing them both, and lets out a small crow of triumph as he molests the edges of the board.

“Can I come out now?” Corey asks, voice edging on a plaintive whine when he realises Mason has all but forgotten about his existence. The salt might as well plunged him down into an oubliette for how it’s relegated him to least interesting thing in the room.

“Oh! Sorry.” Mason breaks himself away from his reverie and slides his foot through the circle of salt to open it, then stares mournfully down at the mess. “I need to vacuum.”

“Could you explain why I just got trapped by seasoning first?”

“It’s because you’re white and don’t have any flavour,” Mason says, completely deadpan, and hustles Corey back over to the bed. The TV is transitioning between screensavers of landscapes, which is much more boring but also less distracting than the goblin sharks. 

Back before his whiteboard – somehow it’s escaped Corey up until this moment, but clearly Mason’s biggest kink of all is meticulously gathering information that he can regurgitate in a lecture, he needs to plan some kind of student teacher roleplay, duh – Mason begins explaining. “The salt you could pass – that was sea salt. But the salt you couldn’t, that was rock salt.” The distinction is lost on Corey, and the loss must be clear all over his face because Mason takes pity, “Corey, you’re a ghost.”

Corey feels his eyes widen, wondering if Mason is about to tell him that he was never resurrected by Theo, he’s just been one of those lost souls they were talking about before and nobody’s had the courage to tell him. Holy shit, what if Mason’s a ghost too? What if the whole pack is, and they’ve all been Sixth Sense-ing each other this whole time, like some kind of folie a – well, not deux, because there are – how many people are there in the pack, are they counting Derek and Peter? And the mystical Isaac and Kira? Whatever, like some kind of folie a huit or fucking whatever?

Mason realises the implications of his words a few beats later – or, more likely, sees the dawning horror on Corey’s face and correctly interprets his thought process, because he quickly clarifies, “Part ghost, Corey. Only part. You’re not – you're alive, you’re not dead.” His expression is dappled with something like anguish, perhaps because this was the big reveal that he’d fantasized about and then Corey immediately splurged his dumb-assery all over the shop.

“Oh.” Corey sighs in relief. That confirms it – ghosts don’t breathe, right? Or maybe they’re like vampires, who according to Deaton still breathe but out of habit rather than functioning lungs. Mason had raised a load of questions following that, about how did their lungs expand to take in the air if the cellular material was dead, did the organs necrotise inside their bodies, did – to which Deaton had calmly replied, “You are dating a glorified zombie chameleon, Mr Hewitt, some questions in this life are not meant to be answered.” Corey had made an offended noise but Mason had accepted the answer and spent three nights sleep-hypothesising instead. Corey nearly smothered himself with a pillow. 

“-like we were saying, but when you go to the astral realm it’s not a part of your conscience or soul that you’re sending, but an actual part of you – that's why you’re tangible on both but only visible on one, and I think if you tried hard enough you could probably stay visible on this plane while seeing the astral plane!”

Corey formulates a generic response to assure Mason that he’s listening and taking the information in even though he’s kind of absolutely freaking out internally, but it’s not needed. Mason should consider changing his name to Bull, last name China Shop, middle name In A for how he’s stampeding through the conversation.

“Another major thing about ghosts – well, maybe not major, but major for us – is that they have inodorosity.”

Mason’s waiting expectantly for audience participation, so Corey uses his last two brain cells to figure out what he’s talking about. It takes even longer than usual for them to rub together, making cricket noises all the time, but eventually his distress and sheer overwhelmedness recede enough for him to figure it out - “I don’t smell when I’m invisible?”

“You don’t smell when you’re invisible!” Mason fairly erupts, like it’s a huge revelation. Maybe it is; Corey just isn’t in the habit of thinking about how he smells other than ‘I hope it’s not bad’. “I just checked with the pack, they’re super confused why I was asking if they ever smelled you when you were invisible, but they all said no, the only way they ever know you’re around is by your heartbeat.” That would explain why his phone has been buzzing near-constantly for the past fifteen minutes. Corey had assumed it was everyone making fun of someone’s typo by repeating the typo relentlessly, as happens regularly. Usually to Stiles and his ADHD-fuelled error-laden rants.

“So,” Mason waves his hands around the board and then stands to the side like a game show co-host ready to spin the prize wheel. “I’ve done a load of research into different types. They’re all kind of the same at a base level, but there’s some interesting variation across different cultures. It’s fascinating. And even if we don’t figure out what type, we still know you’re a ghost. That’s good, right?” Mason’s beam is starting to flicker around the borders at Corey’s reaction, or lack thereof.

“Yeah,” Corey says unconvincingly. The clock on Mason’s bedside table is suddenly very loud. He screws his eyes shut, which helps with the horrific amount of words on the whiteboard but makes the clock even louder. “Sorry. It’s just a lot.”

“Yeah. Hey, it’s okay.” Corey doesn’t open his eyes, but he hears Mason shuffle across the room to him and drop into a crouch, then his hands settle like solid anchors on his knees. “I shouldn’t have said all that so fast, I was just thinking about how cool it was, but – this must be really weird for you.”

“Just a lot,” Corey repeats. He props his elbows on his thighs and then drops his head to his hands, squinting his eyes open just enough to see Mason without having to process the rest of the room. “I mean, this makes me technically part-dead, doesn’t it?” He had a hard enough time wrapping his head around the fact he was resurrected by a Nazi werelion’s stasis tank fluids. This, by comparison, should be far less weird, but somehow it isn’t. At least then he was either dead or alive. Now he’s both, like that stupid cat they learnt about in Physics that he still doesn’t understand. 

Mason doesn’t have any rebuttal for that. “Uh, maybe,” he admits, “probably. I don’t think there’s really a precedent for this. You’re one-of-a-kind.”

Woo, there’s another of Corey’s worst fears. Nobody knows what he is, nobody knows how he is, so if he breaks nobody can fix him. He swallows it all down. Mason was so excited to tell him all of his research, and there’s no point in worrying about something out of his control. Ha, tell that to his anxiety.

But Mason is of course a little psychic, or just very in tune with Corey, and peels his mind open like it’s nothing. “The closer we get to figuring out what’s in your DNA,” he points out quietly, steadily, “the more we can learn about you, and what to do with that information.”

He’s right. Of course he’s right. He’s always right. It would be annoying if it weren’t so un-annoying. And his smile, that smile that could melt the petrification from Medusa’s gaze. Corey can’t help but smile back. “Tell me more.”

At that Mason glows and springs to his feet, bouncing back over to his whiteboard of knowledge and pointing towards a list he’s made down the left-hand side. “Ghosts are created when a person is unable to pass onto the Underworld after death,” he starts. “Remember? Well, the reason they can’t pass over is because they’ve suffered some kind of injustice, whether that’s in life or in death. It can be that they had a violent death, or their killer was never caught, or they had something they wanted to finish first, or even that they weren’t buried properly. And while I can’t be sure, I think that’s why you became this mix. Chameleon for how invisible you felt, ghost for the horrible life.”

“My life isn’t horrible,” Corey protests. “I have it really good in comparison to some people.”

Mason looks unimpressedly irked by that. “Well, first of all,” and Corey shrinks back because oh boy is he in for a loving but harsh admonishment, “there isn’t a scale for misery, you’re allowed to be sad even if other people have it worse. Second, your formative years were spent being abused and-or chronically ill with cancer, that’s pretty fucked up.” Corey wants to argue again, that he barely even remembers a lot of that time, but Mason is warmed up now and is ticking the numbers off on his fingers very emphatically, a sure sign he doesn’t want to be interrupted. “Third, most of the people you’ve loved are now dead, you died yourself at the hands of a serial killer before being resurrected by that same serial killer and forced into helping him with serial killer stuff. Fourth, you generally just have to deal with all the supernatural fuckery that’s around us. And fifth, you’ve gone through at least five life-threatening ordeals in the past year alone, and at least half of them also involved you being hurt to the point of near, if not actual, death.” He draws in a deep breath like there’s more he could say, so Corey cuts in hastily.

“Some parts of my life have not been great,” he accepts, “and maybe – maybe! - I will see a psychiatrist about it one day.” Mason’s face lights up like he’s been gifted the secrets of the universe. “No promises!”

“I do not understand the grudge you have against the psychiatric profession,” Mason sighs. The protest is perfunctory at this point.

“They’re all like-”

“They’re not all like Hannibal Lecter.”

“At least some of them must be,” Corey insists. “At least ten percent of Americans are more willing to try out cannibalism than veganism, you know. The cannibals live among us.”

That side-tracks Mason for a few seconds. “Wait, really? Where did you – I'm Googling that later.” He realises he’s been successfully diverted and taps Corey on the nose lightly. “No changing the subject. You need to deal with your weird psychiatrist phobia.”

“Oh, great idea,” Corey agrees. His tone is too amiable and Mason notices, narrowing his eyes in preparation. “Maybe I should see a psychiatrist about it.”

That hurls them into a ten-minute pillow fight, Mason declaring, “You’re so full of shit!” and dual-wielding goose-down pillows. A truce is declared when Vanessa pokes her head around the door, rolls her eyes fondly at their antics, and asks if they’ll come down to help with dinner in half an hour.

“We only have half an hour to get through the list,” Mason yelps, flinging the pillows away and launching himself back towards his whiteboard. He’s apparently forgotten about the existence of time after dinner, but Corey isn’t going to remind him. If they do this now he can return to his goblin sharks after they eat. “Okay, first and most likely – Mylings.” Mason raps a whiteboard pen against a picture on his board, a weird hand-drawn scribble of a small figure crawling along the ground.

“They’re from Scandinavian lore. They’re child spirits that have been abandoned or neglected or, in the worst cases, abused and killed by their parents. They aren’t really that bad, they just ask for piggyback rides to a cemetery.”

“That’s just kind of sad.”

“Mmm. They get heavier and heavier the closer you get, though, so sometimes people end up collapsing or dying from the exhaustion.”

“But they’re just kids!”

“They’re just kids,” Mason agrees solemnly. While walking back from a date a couple of months ago they passed a park and saw a toddler tumble down a slide in a series of somersaults, land on her head, spring to her feet and immediately climb back up the slide to do the same again, all while laughing to herself delightedly. They have since agreed that children can do no wrong in this world. “Anyway, it all seems like a pretty good fit, but the lore does specify that they haven’t been baptized. I don’t know if you...?” 

“Oh, yeah, I have. Gran took me when I was younger. They put this weird greasy oil on my forehead and then I got dunked in the pool. They didn’t even give me a towel afterwards.”

“Truly a pertinent summary of such a salient religious ceremony,” Mason mumbles with an almost fatal measure of sarcasm, turning to his board and striking a thick black line through the information he’d scrawled on Mylings. “Next up – Taqriaqsuit.”

“Bless you.”

“No, that’s its name.” Mason doesn’t even look surprised at this point, just repeats the jumble of letters slower so Corey doesn’t mistake it for a sneeze again. “They’re Inuit, also known as shadow people. They live in a similar world to ours that we can’t perceive, and they rarely come to visit. They have dark grey bodies with featureless faces and two white pools for eyes. They also can’t be looked at directly.” He turns to Corey expectantly, who’s ready for his role as Negative Nelly now.

“I still have all my features in both worlds. And the Ghost Riders looked at me directly, so have you and Liam when you’ve been invisible with me.”

“And I can see the light refracting around you when you’re invisible,” Mason agrees. “Not that either.” Another line, and onto the next. “Chindi. These are from Navajo lore, spirits born from violence and made up from everything bad that was within a person. Not that I think you have any badness-” oh, you’d be surprised “-but it would fit with the whole shapeshifter lore, right? You take on the shape that you reflect. You died violently and with a lot of pain and misery, that would probably count as bad. But – contact with a chindi leads to a specific illness known as ghost sickness.”

“Imaginative name. But no, I’ve touched you when I’ve been invisible, and Liam, and Scott – and Stiles, remember the prank war that the pack had and we made him think he was being haunted? And none of you have gotten sick.”

Mason nods. Another idea struck off. “Um, the buruburu. Japanese, born from the fear that a person experiences while they’re dying. They attach themselves to a victim and cause ghost sickness again, so I guess we can get rid of that too.”

“If I’m not fully ghost, maybe I don’t have full ghost powers?” Corey ventures. Deaton likes to wax poetic about how chimeras break the rules of the supernatural, which makes him pretty self-conscious – and Theo too, surprisingly, that kind of comment seems to be one of the only things that can dig under his skin.

Mason pulls a face of ‘maybe, maybe not’. “I guess? But none of Theo’s abilities seem to be hampered by not being fully wolf or coyote. And from what I saw of the other chimeras, they could all access their powers fully. Tracy was pretty impressive with her tail.”

The reminder makes Corey smile. “Yeah, she was,” he says affectionately – and okay, she was lethal with that tail and it’s not the kind of thing that he should be reminiscing about probably, but he can still remember those rare moments when the fog of night terrors and confusion from weeks of mind meddling lifted and she was bright and happy, telling terrible jokes (what’s the difference between a dirty bus stop and a lobster with a boob job? one’s a crusty bus station and the other’s a busty crustacean) and climbing that tree with him and Josh to chat about nothing. “Josh could handle loads of electricity, and grow claws and fangs at the same time. He could access the wolf and the eel really easily.”

Mason must be really absorbed in the research, because the mention of the chimeras doesn’t prompt the usual honey-sweet flood of concern in his chemosignals. “I think you just haven’t figured out how to access your full powers yet.” His eyes flicker over to the right side of the board – Corey follows and catches the heading ‘Powers’ but drops his gaze, spoilers. “But we’ll get to that. Next – spectres. They’re created when a death involves a betrayal. I know yours wasn’t that in the traditional sense of the word, but you were technically betrayed by the people around you. The pack swore to protect you or figure out what was happening, I promised not to let them find you – and then they did anyway.” Now his scent tanks, clear guilt and sour regret clouding around him. He carries on in the next second, no chance for Corey to butt in and reassure. “Spectres possess and influence people to act on any grudges they might have, and they’re awakened particularly if their grave is desecrated.”

“I guess being taken to the Nematon instead of being buried could be that?” Corey posits, and stubbornly refuses to listen to his brain reminding him that technically he was buried, he just scrabbled out of that shallow grave as part of a fucked-up rebirthing therapy session only marginally more successful than Candace Newmaker’s and then had his memory wiped afterwards. It slithers back to him in nightmares, though, so that’s fun.

“It could, but do you have feelings of vengeance and anger when you’re on the astral plane?”

“No more than I do on this plane,” Corey answers honestly. “Usually I’m invisible because I’m trying to hide or find out something, so it’s mostly panic or confusion.”

Mason marks the ‘spectre’ row with a question mark, and then runs through what he deems the unlikely candidates – funaurei, thaye, mo roi, obamo, bhoot, shinigami, onryo, lemures, dybbur, hantu, suanggi, pichal peri. True to his categorising, they’re even less probable than any of the others. “That’s all I’ve got,” he mourns, dropping his marker onto its ledge. The clang it makes as it lands heavily is second only to the noise of Mason’s heart shattering into a thousand pieces. 

“Hey.” Corey does grabby-hands until Mason joins him on the bed, flopping down pathetically and wriggling his head into Corey’s lap like a beautiful worm. “This is amazing. Everything you’ve done. I can’t even say how much I appreciate it.”

Despite his existential despair, Mason still raises his eyebrows. “I bet you could show me,” he suggests slyly, because at heart he’s a teenage boy and can be ready to go in thirty seconds.

“Oh, I definitely will,” Corey agrees, which leads to some incoherent stammering and blushing as Mason turns out to be woefully unprepared for the consequences of his lecherous actions. “But seriously, this is great. I never would have figured this out by myself.”

“You would have,” Mason objects. “Might have taken you a decade, but you would have.” He yowls pitifully when Corey leans back to pick up a pillow and holds it up forebodingly. “Half a decade at most! I’m sorry!”

Corey discards the pillow and leans down to kiss him in lieu of violence, the angle awkward and his back expressing its disapproval immediately. Worth it. “I’m happy with ghost,” he murmurs. “I mean, there’s more than one type of wolf, right? But we just say werewolf.” Is there more than one type of wolf? There has to be. Arctic wolves. They’re cute and fluffy and white and not at all like the one that Theo transforms into, even if he is cute and fluffy in his own right I could rip your throat out or slash your stomach open with my claws, I am not cute and fluffy.

“Yeah,” Mason agrees, “yeah, okay. Can’t argue with that.” He visibly settles now that he has some actual logic to justify the nonspecific term, beaming up at him. “This is pretty cool. Look at me, I’m dating a ghost-chameleon-zombie.”

Corey takes rather serious issue with being called a zombie, but the rest of the pack don’t seem to care about his happiness so he endures it with grace. Which is to say, he scowls whenever the word is mentioned and pouts at Mason until he gets apology kisses, even if it wasn’t Mason who said it, but he can’t deny the accuracy. And he’s not going to moan about being resurrected – twice the Corey with none of the brain-eating, good family fun all around. “Didn’t you have some powers you wanted to tell me about?”

“Oh, yeah.” Mason lolls his head to the side to read from the board, unwilling to relinquish his new-found cushion. “Uh, electromagnetic interference. Apparently a lot of ghosts interfere with electricity and devices that run off it. You can tell when ghosts are around because radios and TVs start malfunctioning, stuff like that, cell phones don’t work, even cars can start having weird problems. And then a kind of step-up from that is electrokinesis. That’s when you actively control electricity or even generate it.”

“I don’t think I disrupt electronics.” Corey has a habit of shifting when he’s drunk, and usually when he’s drunk it’s at a party with some source of music. A hoard of inebriated teenagers would definitely notice their speakers shutting down.

“Maybe you need to be trying to do it.” Mason’s already reading the next point, eager to finish his lesson before they’re recruited for vegetable duty. Or maybe a week of aggressive research is finally catching up to him and he’s starting to crash. “Thermokinesis. Um, changing the surrounding temperature; usually the air gets colder when ghosts appear, but some can control that and make it warmer if they want to. Then there’s telekinesis, where you can move things with your mind. With practice, you get stronger, and you can manipulate multiple objects or even people.”

“I’d be like Mathilda!”

“Sure, honey.” Mason pats at his knee absent-mindedly. “Pyrokinesis and hydrokinesis, that’s controlling fire and water. From what I read, that tends to be more to do with how you died. Ghosts that drowned find it easier to work with water, ghosts who burned or were involved in a fire in some way, they can often manipulate fires. And biokinesis. You might be able to inflict wounds on people just by thinking about it.”

“That would be bad. What if someone bumped into me at school and I got annoyed and suddenly they were dead?” Corey really doesn’t want that one. His nickname on the group chat might be ‘sunshine’, but he does instinctively wish violent deaths upon anybody who minorly inconveniences him. He doesn’t hate people - he wants to make everyone happy, but he does also kind of hate people. But he still wants them to be happy. It’s very confusing.

“It probably needs more focus than that,” Mason reassures. “But if you do become an accidental murderer, I will support and love you. Just like you did for me when I kept turning into a bloodthirsty seventeenth-century Frenchman.”

“I’ll try my best not to become an accidental murderer,” Corey promises. His fingers have begun dancing up and down Mason’s neck at some point, and now they tiptoe over to his shoulder and start swirling intricate patterns on the bare skin there. Mason shivers and blinks before continuing, admirably determined to get through the rest of his board despite the distraction.

“Uh, mental influence, just what it sounds like. Sort of possessing a person, could be useful when it comes to hunters, I guess? Otherwise...seems a bit rapey. It’s basically mind control, and I have very strong opinions on that.”

“You have strong opinions on strange, obscure things,” Corey comments. 

Knowing exactly what he’s referencing, Mason just mutters, “It’s a mistranslation and now everyone thinks they’re whales. They’re not killer whales, they’re whale killers, and they’re dolphins.” Corey pats his shoulder comfortingly so he doesn’t fly off into the entire fifteen-minute rant; they’ve watched many an orca documentary together, and he’s well-acquainted with it. “Anyway. Intangibility. That’s the classic walking through walls thing, it basically just means that you don’t have a solid body.”

“I could put my hands inside people,” is where Corey’s mind immediately takes him. Mason looks profoundly disturbed. “Not in a sex way, in a maiming way. You’re the only one I’d put my hands inside of in a sex way.”

“I – I didn’t even think about sex,” Mason sputters, “and that’s worse, Corey, no maiming innocent people with your ghost hands.”

“We don’t even know if I have ghost hands!” Corey protests, moving onto his next sentence before he can examine the absurdity that is his life and this conversation with too much attention. “And they wouldn’t be innocent. I’d use my powers for good, and go after paedophiles and people who are mean to dogs.”

“You do that.” Mason sounds exhausted. Corey can relate – he’s very tiring to be around. Just imagine how he feels, he can never escape himself. “Moving on from ghost sex hands and your twisted mind-” Corey opens his mouth to protest but Mason ploughs ahead – “there’s teleportation. I only read that a couple of times and both of those books said it took a lot of power, and usually ghosts can only move a few metres, maybe up to half a mile unless they’re unusually strong. Mostly ghosts move as people do, just walking around on the astral plane, and then they choose when to appear to people on the physical plane so it just looks like they can teleport.

“Oh, last one. This is the coolest. Environmental manipulation! So not just the electricity and temperature and stuff, but the elements themselves. Fire and water aren’t exactly common but they’re more common than wind and earth - some ghosts can cause earthquakes and hurricanes if they’re strong enough.”

Corey squints at the board. He could have sworn – yeah. “What’s that one at the bottom?”

“Oh, ectoplasm. Only one book said that, and I couldn’t find anything substantial about it. Apparently some ghosts can produce it.”

“Oh boy,” Corey says, voice laced with fake cheer, “I sure hope I have that one!”

“You don’t think ectoplasm would be cool?”

“Do you want a hagfish for a boyfriend?”

“A what now?” For once, Mason is clueless and Corey has the answers. It’s vaguely intoxicating.

“Hagfish! They’re these weird fish-snake things that produce their own slime. Like, they make buckets of it in seconds. It’s a defence mechanism and it’s gross.”

“You need to stop watching so many marine documentaries.”

“You need to start watching more,” Corey counters. “I’ll start the goblin shark one again and you can learn about Grunhilda with me.”

“The researchers called a shark Grunhilda?” Mason asks in disbelief, then resignedly understands, “You called her Grunhilda.”

“It suits her.” Mason looks ready to argue the point, despite never seeing the beauty and grace that is Grunhilda, when Vanessa’s call to the kitchen echoes from downstairs. Corey’s stomach rumbles at the reminder of food, and Mason peals off into laughter as he sits up and swings himself off the bed.

“Okay, Christmas Eve dinner first, then Grunhilda,” he acquiesces. “And I’ll even wait until after Boxing Day before I start trying to make you use your new ghost powers.”

“So generous.”

**Author's Note:**

> feedback is massively appreciated if you have the time to leave any!  
> you can also talk to me on [tumblr](https://cordelia---rose.tumblr.com/) or check out my [fandoms sideblog](https://cordeliarosebutfandoms.tumblr.com/)


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